The timing of these announcements has widely been interpreted as EA hoping to show that they’re moving their focus away from cranking out lots of boxed product for consoles and chasing growth in other areas.

Lots of journalists, analysts and armchair pundits have weighed in to give their opinion on the wisdom of EA’s apparent strategic direction. One that caught my attention was on the blog of Greg Costikyan (formerly of Manifesto Games, and author of the ‘Scratchware Manifesto’). ‘Costik’ is known for his very hardline views on whether creativity can exist in a corporate environment (views which seem to me to be shown up as absurd hyperbolic ravings every time a great game comes out of one of the major publishers who he characterises as irredeemably stagnant).

Here’s what Costikyan had to say about EA/Playfish.

I don’t profess to know the full financial details of all of the deals that Costikyan cites, but I can’t help but think that his conclusions are not entirely soberly objective.

For one thing, I don’t think that EA overpaid for Playfish. Zynga and Playdom may be bigger and able to herd millions more players through their doors, but you have to consider how they’ve done this. Playfish have only recently (two years since their inception) started to seriously push virtual goods, while their competitors have exploited them hyper-aggressively from day one. They don’t spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising their games on Facebook. And yet in the face of an onslaught of advertising from their competitors (for products which in some cases are direct imitations of their own games), they’ve managed to retain millions of players.

Playfish have also been very careful to cultivate their brand image, taking cues from Nintendo, EA and Disney. The recent storm of bad press about “offers” systems (a type of advertising that trades sign-ups for products and customer research surveys for virtual currency, intended to allow players without credit cards to buy into virtual goods) has settled more on Playfish’s competitors.

I think there is also lots of evidence that virtual goods are not a flash in the pan (even if the market doesn’t continue to grow at its current rate forever) and Playfish’s user-interaction-centric approach has already shown that it can make serious money.

Costikyan’s theorising about EA’s major acquisitions tending to be disappointments is also based on very shaky reasoning. His recounting of EA’s headline-grabbing $680m purchase of Jamdat fails to make any mention of the rights this has given them to exploit Tetris well into the next decade, for example.

What little I know of Pogo.com (basically “it’s been going for many years” and “it has millions and millions of users” – although crucially not whether it’s made any money) doesn’t suggest it was a complete flop. I suppose if the purchase of Mythic was intended to produced a “WoW beater”, then that could be deemed a failure, but it’s hard to see how EA could have justified not trying to contest the MMO market, or to identify another company that they could have acquired that would have had a better chance than Mythic.

In any case, there doesn’t seem to be a lot in common between Jamdat, Pogo, Mythic and Playfish to allow meaningful comparisons to be drawn. I don’t rule out the possibility that EA just won’t be able to get their head around Playfish’s market and they’ll end up suffering the same fate as Origin and Westwood Studios back in the 1990s, but I don’t think it’s inevitable either. Small, exciting online games start-ups have been diasporing from EA over the last couple of years – perhaps Playfish will give EA a chance to keep some of their staff who are frustrated with console development within the empire (assuming they haven’t all left already).

Costikyan’s belief that it’s impossible to identify products and studios that are likely to be ‘dead wood’ over the next few years also comes across as a trifle naive. A studio that has been built to specialise in a market that is now shrinking (or dominated by one or two incumbent games – e.g. Forza and GT in racing, or CoD in FPS) might be expensive if not impossible to repurpose. A big ‘factory’ studio that churns out licensed games to fill a quota (like Tiburon, Visceral, or on the Activision side of the fence, Raven or Vicarious Visions) is going to shrink if their parent decides to release fewer titles per year.

The reason EA started chasing new IP (and continues to do so – there’s been no indication thus far to what extent the cull is going to affect new franchises like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge) was to get away from having to rely on (and share profits with) extra-industry IP. The reason (or one of) that they’re buying Playfish is to weaken their bonds with the console manufacturers – the same reason Bobby Kotick has been musing about stand-alone Guitar Hero machines. Another reason of course would be to move into an area where Activision (whose management originate from marketing, rather than product development) wouldn’t be able to follow easily. Letting Activision, Ubisoft et al fight among themselves for increasingly lean table scraps from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft might still give EA the last laugh.

When computer games first took off in the 1980s, there were only two input devices in common use: joysticks and keyboards. It wasn’t until late in the decade that mice joined the party, having had to first achieve market penetration (as late as 1990, many entry-level home computers didn’t ship with mice as standard) and then wait for developers to figure out how to use them effectively (instead of just crudely emulating a joystick).

The mouse and keyboard hybrid control scheme (”WASD”), having undergone many gradual refinements, is now the standard for most contemporary PC game genres. In Consoleland, joysticks were usurped by (digital and later analogue) joypads, at first for reasons of cost, but with later iterations outstripping joysticks in terms of the functionality and comfort they could offer.

Today, the advantages of keyboard & mouse and dual analogue stick joypad controls over their predecessors seem obvious. If there was any outcry in defence of old-fashioned keyboard and joystick controls at the time, it has been lost to history.

Now we’re undergoing the next paradigm shift in controller technology, from analogue thumbsticks to motion tracking pointing devices. A shift that in my opinion is long overdue.

Even in its relatively crude first iteration (the Wii Remote), motion control has already dramatically proven to offer huge benefits in terms of accessibility. Controlling a pointer directly with the hand and wrist, rather than by translation into direction and acceleration via a thumbstick, requires almost no learning and allows for a greater degree of subtlety and precision. A motion tracking controller is in effect a mouse that you can use from the sofa, or as near to that ideal as makes no difference.

(You can immediately disregard any screed against the evils of motion control that goes on about “arm waving” and “exercise” as having entirely failed to grasp this concept. The only motion control technology that sees this kind of interaction as its primary purpose is Microsoft’s marginalised-by-design Project Natal.)

While some have embraced the technological advance of motion control, in other quarters it has been met with confusion or outright fear. I can still remember back in 2005, prior to the Wii’s launch and long before MS and Sony’s motion controller announcements, when Epic Games’ Mark Rein held aloft an Xbox 360 controller and declared that there was “nothing wrong with it“. (There was nothing wrong with one-button joysticks either, for most Amiga games in 1989.) More recently, Frank Lantz of Area/Code applied the logic of a sheet music salesman decrying the rise of the phonograph in this nostalgic article:

“Sorry to sound elitist, but I like that not everybody understands how to play games, and I doubt that I’m alone (…) That games require effort and a particular kind of tricky literacy is one of the things that makes them cool. Would pianos be better if everyone could play them? Would punk rock sound better if your grandparents liked it?”

There’s no need to apologise for elitism when it’s applied in a useful, justified way (most expressive forms benefit from rigourous standards, see e.g. the Royal Academy of Arts) but trying to argue there’s an upside to obstructively flawed controls is just conceited bullshit. The move to motion control does not limit the amount of skill that can be demanded of players if so desired, or dictate that content for every game has to appeal to different audiences.

If a franchise like Call of Duty can routinely draw 10m+ users, the prospect of broadening its control options is not going to compel Infinity Ward to change the content into a series of party minigames. For the overwhelming majority of users (there will always be a few who simply can’t adapt to any other control method that the first one they learned – instead giving up gaming altogether as controls became “too complicated” for them), motion control expands the options available without taking anything away.

Allowing a broader base of users access to games with more complex interactions (without first punishing them with countless hours of unrewarding training to learn anachronistic interfaces) doesn’t only result in healthier profits (as we’ve seen with the Wii), it ultimately expands the talent pool. What percentage of students, artists, writers and inventors currently think it’s even possible, let alone worthwhile, for them to get involved in game development? Anything that helps raise that number should be seen as absolutely critical to prevent games from becoming stagnant.

(Another puzzling thing about that article is the assumption that motion controls can only be applied to literal, real-world, 1:1 scale human body motions. There’s nothing preventing motion being used as abstractly as joystick and mouse input. There are many games that don’t involve humanoid avatars or simulations of real-world control interfaces. Motion sensors could allow the same to be done in true 3D space, beyond the capabilities of 2D thumbstick and mouse interfaces.)

The misconception that motion control should be about jumping around the living room has resulted in the improvements that they bring to more traditional control schemes being largely overlooked. Super Mario Galaxy’s controls are derided for having the player shake the Wii Remote to perform a spin “when it could be mapped to a button” (indeed it could, at the expense of the tactile feedback from swinging around vines, etc. etc.) or “not using the cursor enough” (except for the pull stars, which would be impossible to implement without it). Metroid Prime 3 and Resident Evil 4 are criticised for “making aiming too easy”(!). It already feels jarring when the accelerometer’s physical connection is absent – hammering a button to use the Batclaw in Batman Arkham Asylum, or performing telekinesis with a joystick in Dead Space both feel faintly ridiculous and not at all immersive.

Being able to track motion in 3-D space (as with Wii Motion Plus and the new Sony and Microsoft systems) starts to really put clear water between motion tracking and joypads. Being able to ‘reach into’ the world lets us do more interesting things with physics. It’s more intuitive, and it’s more satisfying.

Take for example the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2. While this tool allows the player to manipulate objects in the world in a fairly physically realistic way, it also highlights how inadequate a mouse on a 2D plane (or worse, clumsily prodding a stick) is for replicating the range of actions that can be performed by human hands. This kludginess brings to mind the last generation of keyboard-centric FPS (such as Duke Nukem 3D and Dark Forces), which did things like using the ‘PgUp’ and ‘PgDn’ keys to tilt the player’s view because the technology (and player’s expectations) hadn’t quite reached the point where mouselook made sense.

Some will argue that their unsuitability for certain genres will prevent motion controllers replacing joypads as the default pack-in peripheral for new consoles. It doesn’t work like that. The commercial focus will simply shift to genres that motion control can support. The Sony Playstation had few successful RTS, FPS and point-and-click adventures due to its lack of a mouse.

The only genres where motion controllers are seriously deficient at present are fighting and racing games. Fighting games are already more of a niche pursuit than they were five or ten years ago, and will probably continue to be released alongside arcade sticks. Racing games will probably fare better with the arrival of more advanced motion systems than the Wii Remote (although the Mario Kart wheel is borderline acceptable already). For every other genre that can be played at least passably well with a joypad, motion control is as good or better. (Keyboard and mouse control has spottier genre support, still offering the best method for playing FPS and MMO games, while being more or less useless for racing, fighting and platform games.)

Motion control is not the only challenge to its ongoing relevance that the joypad faces. Already a large segment of games sold across all three consoles don’t use joypads at all. Most obviously there are the music games (Guitar/Band/DJ Hero, SingStar, Rock Band) but the trend for specialised peripherals is growing outside of the music genre, too: Wii Fit, Shaun White’s Snowboarding, EyePet, Buzz!, and (erm) Let’s Tap. As games retail fights for life, we can expect many more oversized plastic replicas cluttering our games cupboards.

Then there are the cheap/free/freemium PC, browser and iPhone platforms, where all games are designed for control with keys and/or a cursor, and where a game’s inability to adapt to a joypad is not seen as a major failing. (It doesn’t seem to have dented World of Goo or Flight Control’s fortunes.)

The joypad has had a good innings, but progress marches on, and controller technology still has far to go even once motion control has become established. I’m sure ten years from now forums will be full of angry gamers threatening to quit their hobby if direct neural links start to take market share away from traditional motion wands.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts have been running occasional events aimed at the games industry for most of the last year. The latest of these was particularly notable – an hour-long chat with David Braben, head of Frontier Developments and one half of the creative team behind the classic computer game Elite, timed to coincide with its 25th anniversary.

Braben’s career was discussed in roughly chronological order, starting with the circumstances which led him (and fellow Cambridge student Ian Bell) to develop one of the first (if not the first) 3D home computer games. The details of this (astonishing) tale may have been familiar to most of the audience (having been chronicled by Francis Spufford in his book Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, which was later televised as part of Brits Who Made The Modern World).

Braben noted that he’d originally been drawn to 3D graphics rather than games specifically, with a desire to render them at an acceptable speed being the reason for his early move to low-level assembly programming, and (if I understood correctly) that he’d only been programming for two years by the time Elite was released. It was also revealed that the colour status display (a neat trick on the BBC Micro which Acorn themselves didn’t know was possible) was a feature they had coded for a sequel to Elite, but which was folded back into the original shortly before release.

After briefly talking about how the process of porting Elite to a seemingly endless procession of obscure formats dulled their enthusiasm, some time was given over to the story of Lander, Zarch and Virus (three iterations of the same basic game). Braben explained exactly how awesomely powerful the 32-bit Archimedes computer was compared to anything else available at the time, and the difficulty that arose in trying to port the game down to the comparatively weedy 16-bit computers.

The conversation then moved on to the Elite sequels (Frontier and First Encounters). The interviewer (gi.biz’s Phil Elliott) got into a bit of a pickle here, seemingly not quite realising that First Encounters had been released in a severely unfinished state as a result of publisher pressure and trying to segue this into a point about patching games after launch. Things got back on track with a look at some of Frontier Developments’ post-Elite projects, including V2000 (the striking title screen of which immediately brought back my long-forgotten memories of playing the game briefly in 1998) and A Dog’s Life (which, we found out, featured animation which caught the attention of Aardman Animation’s Nick Park, leading to Frontier being approached to develop the first Wallace & Gromit games).

The talk was rounded off with a look at Frontier’s forthcoming games (LostWinds part 2, The Outsider and, naturally, cryptic hints about Elite IV), a Q&A session and Braben’s thoughts on the state and future direction of the industry (in a largish nutshell: games are still in their infancy, we haven’t figured out all the potential uses for the technology we already have, games are going to become better at telling dynamic stories, and characters and worlds are – at least in the example he gave of the film Star Wars – often more interesting than the archetypal stories that they happen to move through).

It should also be noted that David Braben successfully managed to manually dock, live on stage, while being interviewed.

(Also, other people took better photos.)

Research and Development is a puzzle-oriented single-player mod for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 developed by Matt Bortolino. It was released in July and is slowly starting to generate a well-deserved buzz in the wider gaming community. In single-player gameplay terms it’s perhaps the best thing that anyone has ever done with the Source engine, and by that I don’t mean “…by a mod developer”, I’m including the Half Life 2 episodes and Portal in that comparison.

The game is set in the Half Life 2 universe and for the most part uses existing Half Life 2 assets. The player character has no hazard suit and no weapons (although they do obtain the Gravity Gun and Antlion Pheromones during the course of the game), and must progress through a series of puzzle rooms, using their wits and the environment to deal with hazards, obstacles and enemies.

Many rooms introduce new game mechanics to the Half Life 2 toolbox such as portable ladders, breakable pipes, sheets of bulletproof glass and electrical traps that repulse the player instead of killing them. Some areas involve building or setting in motion physics-based Heath Robinson contraptions, others involve the kind of detective work usually found in point-and-click adventures. There are also some sequences (particularly a lengthy on-rails journey) that test the player’s ability to spot threats and counter them under time pressure. Successfully completing an area often triggers a gloriously over-the-top ‘payoff’, with the player’s actions wiping out all the nearby enemies in some amusing fashion or literally launching them into the next area.

Several of the puzzles are considerably tougher to figure out and to manually execute than anything in the official Valve games, and enormously satisfying as a result. I have a growing suspicion that Valve’s obsession with iteratively tweaking their games based on feedback from testers has the unintended side effect of expunging anything challenging or frustrating, which in turn neuters their ability to be memorable or extensively replayable. Even Left4Dead often feels fairly toothless as a game (as opposed to a social experience) once the novelty has worn off, like a scrolling beat-’em-up set on free play.

Research and Development’s only major shortcoming next to Valve’s own work is the understandably modest standard of its production values. There’s no new voicework, interaction with friendly NPCs or much in the way of new art, not that any of this is strictly necessary. The final section of the game (which sends up the frequent use of ‘jerry-rigged’ vehicles in Half Life 2) is also a little bit glitchy in the current build, with entering and exiting the vehicle not working quite as well as it should.

Although Research and Development is quite a dense experience, it’s probably only going to provide most players with an evening’s entertainment at most. Portal didn’t attract criticism for being short, but it was pretty obvious after the extended tutorial portion that they’d wrung just about all they could out of the (technically finicky and expensive) portal mechanic, whereas Research and Development gives the impression of being just be a taster of what could be delivered given enough time and money.

While you’re playing it though, you’ll be too busy cooing at the steady stream of new toys, whooping with glee (well, not literally, unless you’re American) as you crack each puzzle and nodding appreciatively at the little atmospheric touches that litter every room to give much thought to these shortcomings.

If you have The Orange Box for PC, get this.

Twitter: I now use twitter fairly extensively and find it augments the site well. New blog posts will always be announced there, and I also link to interesting articles (and games) elsewhere that don’t warrant a long-form blog entry. Follow me on twitter.

Shops: I’ve set up Spreadshirt and Amazon storefronts. The Spreadshirt store currently offers some t-shirts that I made for my own amusement and to test the service. The quality of their printing process is exceptional. I intend to add some additional (more gaming-related) designs in future but the process is quite labour intensive. The Amazon store features a selection of games and books that have the Citystate seal of approval.

Behind the scenes: I started building this site around 2005 before WordPress offered many basic amenities. I’ve since made some progress in bringing it up to date: adding back the comment system and blogroll, integrating WordPress’s media library properly, and adding the fancy carousel on the front page, among other things.

Content: There’s now quite a lot of it. The historically most popular articles have been the Restaurant City guide, Resident Evil 4, Writing for games, Games for Windows 2000 and Some recent books about games. The ones I’m most satisfied with include the NGPC Retrospective, the Morpheme history, Smoke and Mirrors and this nonsense.

As ever, any feedback can be directed to email (contact (AT) this site), comments or twitter.

There are a few other NGPC games that are on par with those I’ve looked at over the last six days. Neo Turf Masters is a nice arcade golf game in the tradition of Links and PGA Tour. Picture Puzzle (a Picross game), Puyo Pop, Puzzle Bobble and Pac-Man are all faithful implementations.

It would be remiss to write about a cult Japanese games system without at least mentioning its more outré software offerings. The NGPC’s slim library included mini-game collections, dating sims and even a version of train driving sim Densha de Go!, though none of these was quite as strange as Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun.

And so, we come to the net verdict of our reappraisal of the machine by modern standards (the Cumulo-supercede-o-factor if you will). By any objective measure the machine is obsolete. Outmoded. Kaputt. All of its games can be filed away as being mildly historically interesting but of no immediate relevance to the modern gaming scene.

Except one.

Card Fighters Clash is still one of the very best handheld games ever made. In revisiting the game for this article I’ve become addicted again. If you’ve never had the pleasure, get onto eBay or your retro games stockist of choice and track it down, along with the machine. Or better still, get two and a link cable. The whole kit shouldn’t cost you much more than the price of a new game.

After a short while you’ll forget that you’re squinting at a screen that would shame a pocket calculator, and will become immersed in one of the purest, most satisfying experiences gaming has to offer. Perhaps some day soon SNK Playmore and Capcom will realise its potential and re-release it properly across multiple formats.

Nintendo might have had the last laugh when it came to commercial success in the handheld arena, but how many Game Boy, Game Boy Advance or even DS games will have kept their lustre after ten years? In this respect at least the NGPC lived up to its potential.

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I wrote about this game before in 2003, but these are my updated (and hopefully final) views.

If you take a group of artists that has been denied meaningful creative freedom for years, and give them carte blanche to make what they want, the result is typically going to be a glorious, undisciplined shambles. (Ever seen The Monkees’ film?) Thusly, when SNK’s developers were allowed to make something for the NGPC that wasn’t yet another fighting game, they delivered what has to be the most peculiar game on the system.

Ignoring Pokémon for once, Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun takes its inspiration from that other great portable gaming craze – Tamagotchi. It presents a window into the life of Neo Poke-Kun, a hapless, big-headed homunculus who lives in a dingy bedsit inside the NGPC’s circuits, and follows a routine based on the system clock.

Poke-Kun differs from a typical virtual pet in that rather than having to feed and water him, the player is given responsibility for his emotional wellbeing. This is quite a tall order, as the methods of interaction available are intentionally extremely limited, indirect and unpredictable.

One of the few actions available is summoning a (random) visitor to Poke-Kun’s front door. Each visitor has a number of brief ’skits’ that they can perform with Poke-Kun. Some make him happy or excited, but most annoy, embarrass or physically abuse him in some way. All are bizarre and inexplicable – a racing driver, a giant nose, a man who skips rope with his moustache, a dog in a leotard that fouls itself, and worse. The cast of visitors is extensive, with new and stranger ones being introduced over time.

By waggling the joystick you can cause some misfortune to befall Poke-Kun, from dropping a pan on his head, to burning his house down. It’s not clear what purpose this serves. The intention might simply be to thumb the nose at control-mashing players frustrated at the lack of interaction.

The actual ‘game’ part comes in when you elect for the third and last available action: sending Poke-Kun to work. Assuming he’s in a good enough mood, he’ll slowly ‘build’ minigames which you can then select from a menu. There are thirty minigames in all, divided into tiers of increasing complexity, effectively parodying different eras of gaming. Starting with Pong and Asteroids, Poke-Kun tries his hand at a wide range of genres, culminating in ‘modern’ fighting and dancing games.

Even though their style becomes progressively more sophisticated, all of the minigames are quite simplistic and shallow. Some are enjoyable time-wasters (the one involving dodging lava spewed from a volcano is particularly well balanced) but just as many are tedious, frustrating or hampered by clumsy controls.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems obvious how Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun could have been made much more compelling as a conventional game. It contains all the component pieces (referential minigames, minimal controls, bizarre visual humour) which Nintendo later used to make the WarioWare games, but the designers just never had the eureka moment of realising that there was a better way in which they could be slotted together.

What we’re left is a game that doesn’t have any interest in pandering the conventional criteria by which games are judged. Some will see it as a stupid unplayable mess, or an “art game”, but (like its host platform) it’s an interesting failure.

Score: A tortoise looking at you balefully/10

Developer/Publisher: SNK

Supercede-o-factor: It’s unlikely that anyone will ever try to replicate Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun. The “IP” is linked to closely to the NGPC for there to ever be a direct sequel. WarioWare, Ouendan and Rhythm Heaven all have a similarly irreverent sense of humour, and all work better as games.

Next: Conclusion

One of the few games released for the NGPC that didn’t piggyback on an established gaming brand, Faselei! is a turn-based tactical game about giant robots. It appeared in the UK right at the end of the machine’s life, with a limited quantity reaching the shelves before SNK made like Arnie and did a Total Recall. Complete copies of the game (with the box and manual) are rare – you’ll more often find the cartridge being sold on its own, sourced from SNK’s liquidated stock.

While at first glance Faselei! appears to be heavily influenced by (Square’s venerable mecha tactics series) Front Mission, it adds some innovations of its own to the formula. The most significant of these is the way that the game flow is structured. Each turn, you program in a sequence of commands (moving, turning, firing, reloading, defending, and so on) and hit ‘execute’, and then watch as all the units on the map play out their turns simultaneously. It’s reminiscent of programming the LOGO turtle at school, except with more explosions.

This system cuts out having to wait around for the CPU units to take their turns, and the need for fudgy rules about line-of-sight or interrupts to prevent units with lots of action points from running around ambushing everyone before they have a chance to react. The game’s giant robots are appropriately referred to as Toy Soldiers – wind them up and watch them go.

Faselei! is not a game that offers instant gratification. The starting robot is weedy and has poor manoeuvrability. The customisation options are initially bewildering, and the difficulty curve rises steeply over the first few missions. Melee weapons quickly become essential, as you simply can’t carry enough ammunition to dispatch every enemy that the longer missions throw at you. The fact that battles are played out in a tiny window by robots the size of favicons doesn’t help matters.

Persevere, though, and each of these obstacles gradually recedes. Upgrading your mecha not only lets you equip more and better weapons, but also expands the bank of commands that you can input, allowing you to turn and dash, take aimed shots and call for backup. With the onus taken off basic survival, tactical experimentation and customising your Toy Soldier come to the fore.

The spartan nature of the playing field is offset by unusually polished presentation for the narrative. Missions are peppered with radio banter between the characters and brief illustrated cut-scenes. A large supporting cast of is introduced throughout the game, and are given enough character that it actually seems a bit of a shame that you wind up having to kill a lot of them. It’s nothing more sophisticated than a Saturday morning smashy-robot cartoon, but it gives context to an otherwise very dry simulation.

The soap opera story also goes a long way to disguising the fact that all the missions boil down to traversing a small map and killing everything. With only thirteen missions, the game is also a little short, but balanced in such a way as to encourage multiple playthroughs (retaining your equipment and experience each time). It actually takes a few replays before you’re able to get your hands on the best Toy Soldiers and kit. The last few secret items (Obligatory Collecting Mechanic) only appear as random drops in the skirmish mode, so to complete the game 100% necessitates some MMO-style grinding.

Faselei! gives the impression of being a game that someone was passionate to see made. The user interface barely manages to fit on the NGPC’s tiny screen (swapping out different elements when they’re not needed) and a huge amount of attention to detail has gone into everything from the cut-scenes to customising your mecha. It was never designed for mass appeal, and has been left behind by the march of progress, but can still be appreciated as a polished, understated piece of craft.

It also has a multiplayer mode, which nobody has ever, ever played.

Score: 8/10

Developer: Sacnoth

Publisher: SNK

Supercede-o-factor: Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, Front Mission… fans of the turn-based tactical genre are spoilt for choice these days, and most modern tactics games have far more meat on their bones than Faselei!.

Next: Ganbare Neo-Poke Kun

While most of the games for the NGPC were developed by SNK (or their partners), there was a small but consistently high quality third party presence. SNK presumably offered favourable terms to encourage Capcom, Namco, Sega and Taito to speculate on the system. Titles including Puzzle Bobble Mini, Pac-Man and Sonic Pocket Adventure added some much-needed variety and brand power to the NGPC’s library.

Sonic Pocket Adventure is a loose port of Sonic 2, with a smattering of elements from the other Mega Drive Sonic games. The graphics are a bit less colourful (falling somewhere between Master System/Game Gear and Mega Drive standards) but Sonic’s trademark speed and responsiveness are intact. The classic Sonic 2 bonus stage (an into-the-screen slalom run) is also replicated here.

The Obligatory Collecting Element involves finding jigsaw pieces scattered around the stages. There’s also a time trial mode and a two-player system link mode (”Sonic Rush”). Apart from a few cosmetic snips (Tails is largely absent, and the terrain is a little bit more angular), the game is still recognisable as Sonic 2. The developers realised that they were working with strong source material and haven’t fiddled with the formula too much.

While the content of Sonic Pocket Adventure is familiar, in revisiting it I was surprised at how difficult the game now seems. I remember completing the Mega Drive games dozens of times in the 1990s. These days I prefer games that offer more than straightforward tests of reflexes and patience, but it’s always a bit dispiriting to be reminded how badly your ’skillz’ have atrophied.

Score: 7/10

Developer: Sonic Team/Dimps

Publisher: SNK/Sega

Supercede-o-factor: If you want a handheld platform game, the modern systems have the genre well covered, from New Super Mario Bros. to LocoRoco. If you want a handheld Sonic game, things get a bit sketchier – Sonic Rush Adventure on the DS is worth a look. If you want a Sonic game that evokes the character’s Nineties glory days rather than his ignominious post-Dreamcast decline (tired, flabby and surrounded by a multicoloured crowd of hangers-on) Sonic Pocket Adventure is the best choice.

Next: Faselei!

Ruddy mine carts.

I’m tempted to leave the review at that, but I suppose I should explain.

SNK made two Metal Slug spin-offs for the NGPC (the 1st and 2nd Missions). These feature micro-miniaturised versions of all the recognisable elements from the arcade series: accident-prone ‘Allo ‘Allo Nazi enemies, devastating guns, screen-filling bosses, beardy power-up granting POWs, mangled speech samples and of course an assortment of driveable vehicles.

In spite of all the obvious care that’s gone into shrinking everything down, it doesn’t disguise the fact that the NGPC hardware just isn’t up to the job. The main selling point of the Metal Slug games (particularly the early ones) was the spectacle. Stripped of the elaborate backdrops, lavish explosions, waves of enemies, collapsing scenery and superfluous animations, what you’re left with isn’t really Metal Slug any more.

The designers have attempted to compensate for this lack of visual embellishment by moving the focus away from pure shooting, mixing in some sprawling platforming levels and (you guessed it) a collecting mechanic based around finding the 100 hostages hidden throughout the 38 stages.

They meant well, but trying to construct challenges that are interesting, mentally taxing or even simply fair with a set of components built for a straightforward shooting game is a hapless task. There are frustrating, landmark-less mazes. Hidden doors that you’d never guess the location of without GameFAQs. Levels where you have to guide a tank across a slippy-slidy ice world strewn with landmines (although this, at least, is skill-based and only has to be negotiated to access a different branch of levels).

But worst of all is the unskippable mine cart ride in the closing stages of the game, which involves a series of jumps which have to be made at exactly the right moment to avoid instant death. Finding out when to jump can only be achieved through trial and error, and actually pulling it off requires nerves of steel and good old-fashioned blind luck. If you run out of continues in the attempt, hard luck. Even by 1999’s standards the game was unusually determined to punish the player.

Metal Slug: 2nd Mission is front-loaded with enough straightforward run-and-gun and vehicular levels (with two playable characters and various branching paths to vary things up a bit) that it’s still fun in short bursts before it starts to get bogged down. Even so, it’s neither a good Metal Slug game nor a particularly distinguished platform shooter, and not worth paying over the odds for.

Score: 6/10

Developer/Publisher: SNK

Supercede-o-factor: The NGPC Metal Slug games are technically proficient, but don’t retain enough of the main series’ strengths to be of interest to anyone but Metal Slug completists. If you want a true portable Metal Slug game, Metal Slug 7 on the DS is your man.

Next: Sonic Pocket Adventure

To eke out some more mileage from the Capcom license, SNK devised Card Fighters Clash, a virtual CCG based around collecting, trading and battling with charmingly-illustrated cards based on characters from SNK and Capcom’s back catalogues. They were probably as surprised as anyone when it turned out to be the best game on the system.

Positioned as the NGPC’s answer to Pokémon, it was released in two versions (Capcom and SNK, natch), each of which was weighted to make their respective company’s cards appear more frequently, but was in all other respects identical.

The single player game involves a lightweight RPG framework allowing the player to gradually gain access to rarer and more powerful cards and tougher AI opponents. This is set (somewhat prosaically) in ‘real world’ amusement centres around Japan. Capcom and SNK games are constantly referenced (as fiction), and there are even cameo appearances by some of their staff. (At one point you pay a visit to Shinji Mikami, who naturally lives in the Resident Evil mansion along with some card-battling zombies.)

In total there are 300 cards to collect, covering the roster of virtually every contemporary SNK or Capcom fighting game, as well as characters from Mega Man, Metal Slug, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Ikari Warriors, Resident Evil and other, more obscure games. A few cards can only be acquired by trading with another player via system link. Completing the game’s fixed goals is a substantial time investment, and if it gets its hooks into you (note: it will), there’s no upper limit to the amount of diversion on offer.

Card Fighters Clash is one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played. It offers the same undemanding drip-feed of endorphins as the likes of Puzzle Quest and Peggle, but augments this with a layer of genuine strategic depth. As with ‘real’ CCGs like Magic: The Gathering, it’s possible to construct multiple decks to suit different strategies. Admittedly, there are a few overpowered cards, but as you’re at the mercy of the hand you’re dealt, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get the chance to use them. There are also plenty of ‘lesser’ cards with special abilities that can upset the most carefully laid plans.

There was a sequel (more a ‘version 2.0′) released in Japan, for which an unofficial translation is available online. This includes new artwork and a selection of new cards, but frankly SNK managed to nail the design so well with the first version that these extras are just window dressing. My only reasons for not giving Card Fighters a 10 are that 1) the AI is a bit stupid once you figure out its major blind spot, and 2) I played it so much when it came out that it nearly cost me my degree.

Score: 9/10

Developer/Publisher: SNK

Supercede-o-factor: There has since been a Card Fighters game on the DS, but by all accounts it was a bit of a disaster, being a continuation of the franchise in name only. As a simulation of a card game, Card Fighters doesn’t suffer from the absence of flashy graphics, and the game itself has proven to be timeless. We can safely conclude that it hasn’t been superceded and is still totally worth tracking down.

Next: Metal Slug 2nd Mission

With SNK’s pedigree, you’d expect that the NGPC’s library would bountifully stocked with fighting games, and it doesn’t disappoint. SNK released no fewer than eight portable fighting titles, covering all of their main franchises at the time (King of Fighters, Fatal Fury, Samurai Shodown, The Last Blade), but the jewel in the crown was SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of The Millennium.

It’s clear from the outset that SvC:MOTM was intended to be the flagship title for the machine. It boasts a roster of 26 characters (plucked from the titles mentioned previously for the SNK side, and from the Street Fighter II, Alpha and Darkstalkers series for Capcom) each with a move set close to their arcade counterparts.

SNK avoided the mistake of trying to scale down their existing artwork to fit the NGPC’s screen. Instead, cute “super-deformed” character sprites are used, drawn at the system’s native resolution. This (presumably very labour-intensive) solution had the upside of providing space for thousands of animation frames, which are put to good use with lots of elaborate round introductions, taunts and special moves.

Aside from the graphics, the other limiting factor was the control scheme. The NGPC only has two buttons, which might seem like a showstopper for a genre like 2D fighters. SNK’s solution to this was to ‘double up’ each button by distinguishing between a short tap (for weak kick/punch) and a longer press (for fierce). It works surprisingly well.

Both of these compromises are only skin-deep – the underlying game retains the fluidity and complexity of the full-scale arcade games from whence its cast was plucked.

Beyond the straightforward arcade campaign mode, the game contains a plethora of life-extending extras. As well as special moves and hidden characters to unlock, there are nine mini-games to master (including four non-fighting ones, each of which would make a good iPhone game in its own right), records to beat and countless completely superfluous secrets to find. Even the mini-games have secrets. Hell, even the menu screens have secrets.

At this point I’m peeking through my fingers and hoping that I’ve not misused any fighting game terminology too egregiously. I may not know much about the genre, but I know what I like. I would put SNK vs. Capcom in the same bracket as Soul Calibur and Street Fighter IV, in so far as it’s accessible enough to reward Johnny Casual’s (i.e. my) ham-fisted attempts to master it, but deep enough for hardcore fans to dive into more deeply.

Score: 8/10

Developer/Publisher: SNK

Supercede-o-factor: At the time of release, cramming so much content and mechanical depth into a handheld game was a technical marvel. Today, the PSP offers a robust selection of arcade-perfect 2D and 3D fighting games that render SvC:MOTM technically obsolete. That said, fighters tend to age gracefully (as Capcom’s endless ports of Street Fighter II attest), and time hasn’t diminished the feel of the controls or the obvious love for the subject matter that the game radiates.

Next: SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash

The NeoGeo Pocket Color was launched in the West ten years ago this month. Each day this week, starting from tomorrow, I’ll be looking at a key game for the system and discussing its merits in terms of whether it’s still worth playing today. Before all that, let’s take a look at the machine itself and its history.

There’s a school of thought that believes that games are heading inevitably towards a single platform future. Things would be so much easier, they snivel, if only we could follow the film industry’s example and agree on a standard like DVD. I’m not so sure. With games, the interplay between hardware and software is always going to be more nuanced than popping in a disc and pressing play.

Every games platform is the result of a chain of decisions (from hardware specifications to how the end product is marketed) that carve out a subset of games that are technically viable, and then a smaller subset of those that will actually sell. The kind of machine that can sell 100 million units is going to be built first and foremost to grab the low-hanging fruit.

Occasionally a console comes along that doesn’t try to please everybody all of the time, focusing instead on addressing a particular niche exceptionally well. One such specialised mutant was the NeoGeo Pocket Color (NGPC), a handheld console manufactured by arcade (and ‘niche’ home console) stalwarts SNK to break into a market that had been dominated for a decade by Nintendo’s Game Boy. An audacious move, but in 1999 (the year of the Dreamcast, The Matrix and, erm, The Phantom Menace?) the mood was sufficiently optimistic for gamers to entertain the notion that 20th Century Goliaths like Nintendo and Sony were due for a fall.

SNK weren’t quite so foolish as to try to tackle the Game Boy head on. Instead, they targeted an audience that Nintendo weren’t contesting – the grown-up gamers that had moved on to the PlayStation. The Game Boy had gone unchallenged for so long, and its archaic 8-bit architecture had fallen so far behind the home consoles, that by 1999 it was firmly pigeonholed as a child’s toy. This was a perception that Nintendo were in no hurry to dispel, seeing little detrimental effect to their efforts to sell Pokémon to every ten-year-old on the planet. Even the previous year’s revamp (the Game Boy Color) had only made the most perfunctory efforts to beef up the machine’s capabilities, putting it roughly on par with the original NES.

The NGPC’s specifications easily outstripped the Game Boy’s right across the board. It had a 16-bit CPU capable of pumping out blazing fast flicker-free 146-colour graphics, a dedicated sound chip and an internal calendar and clock. Every game had flash memory backup, doing away with cumbersome password saving.

(It should be pointed out before we continue that SNK weren’t quite the technical visionaries the NGPC spec might suggest. They had originally launched a monochrome version in Japan, then rushed to add colour support a few months later to stave off unflattering comparisons with the Game Boy Color.)

Just as importantly, SNK had paid close attention to the needs of a portable device. The NGPC could run for a preposterous 40 hours on a single pair of AA batteries. It was petite (about the size and weight of a closed DS Lite) with a slightly hollowed underside allowing it to fit snugly in the hands.

For all the improvements under the hood, the NGPC’s most celebrated feature was its microswitched thumbstick. This stick was orders of magnitude more comfortable and precise than the tiny, spongy d-pads that Nintendo have been gradually making smaller and less responsive with each of their handhelds since the original Game & Watch, and it remains one of gaming’s greatest mysteries that nobody has copied it since.

Sadly, the NeoGeo Pocket Color’s low cost, high performance and physics-defying battery life came at a price. Like the later Game Boy Advance, the NGPC used a reflective TFT screen with no backlight. While the shortcomings of this screen are not quite as pronounced as the GBA’s (which needed hardware hacks or a miner’s lamp to even be playable), having to hold the screen at awkward angles to catch sufficient photons seems archaic in an age when even the cheapest mobile phone has a bright full-colour screen.

In the end, the NGPC didn’t put a crimp in Nintendo’s plans, beyond perhaps inducing them to get the 32-bit Game Boy Advance out the door more quickly. It survived in the market for just two years (1999-2001) before SNK’s financial troubles forced them to sell up to pachinko maker Aruze, who unceremoniously dropped all video game activities prompting a recall of all NGPC stock from Western territories.

During its life, the system found a small but supportive audience, even in the UK. It was sensibly priced and marketed to adults (with mainstream press advertising and prominent displays in high street stores), leveraging recognisable games such as Sonic, Pac-Man and Puzzle Bobble.

In all, there were fewer than 100 games released for the NGPC. Leaving aside the ranks of uninspiring parlour games, anaemic JRPGs and fruit machine sims, we are left with at least a couple of dozen games in the competent-to-great range. Many are ports or spin-offs of existing titles, but in all such cases they’ve been heavily reworked to suit the machine’s capabilities – SNK seem to have taken great pains to win the favour of fans of the originals. In a nod to the prevailing market trends of the time, many of the games shoehorn in a Pokémon-esque collecting element.

So far so rose-tinted, but things have moved on in ten years. Since the NGPC’s death we’ve seen the handheld market go nuclear, gorging on advances in screen, battery and miniaturisation technology served up by the burgeoning mobile phone sector. With the PSP, DS and iPhone now offering thousands of games catering to every taste, does the cream of the NGPC’s library still have anything to offer? To answer that, I have picked six games that at one time or another I would have described as essentials for the system, to find out whether they’ve stood the test of time.

Next: SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium

It must be hard for the younger generation to imagine what gaming was like in the 20th century. A case in point: up until the early 1990s, one of the main motivators for playing (or completing) new games was seeing new graphics. The amount of computer imagery being generated anywhere in the world at the time was very small, and floppy disks and ROM cartridges provided precious little space for purely decorative images (which were usually painstakingly hand-drawn). I distinctly remember the promise of perhaps a single, quarter-screen still image seeming like a fair reward for the hours of effort it took to complete most Sega Master System games.

It became a commercial imperative for developers to make sure that the limited amount of artwork in their games was as attractive as possible. Studios like The Bitmap Brothers and Psygnosis became famous for their visual style as much as for the content of their games. As a result there was great demand for a paint package that would allow artists to produce work quickly, efficiently and with the minimum of programming knowledge or intermediate steps. Probably the most successful and widely used package was Electronic Arts’s Deluxe Paint.

Deluxe Paint (colloquially known as ‘DPaint’) was available for the Amiga, Atari ST and DOS. (The PC versions still run happily under Windows XP.) It was used by many of the main development studios of the late 80s and early 90s. It was particularly heavily used by LucasArts (with all of their adventure games using it for the majority of their artwork prior 1997), as well as Origin (Wing Commander, Ultima) and of course Electronic Arts themselves. (The intro movies to several EA games including Space Hulk and The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes were actually stored in DeluxePaint Animation format.)

Many previews of PC, Amiga and 16-bit console games in the magazines of the time included screenshots of sprite sheets being put together in DPaint. Another tell-tale sign that Deluxe Paint was used in a game’s development is the use of the package’s standard fonts. These were used in dozens of games where the artists couldn’t be bothered to draw a unique logo or typeface, for example Ecco Jr. and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.

Deluxe Paint had lots of features that made it well suited to producing game graphics. Pixel-level editing was very easy and intuitive, much more so than in Adobe Photoshop. The left mouse button drew in the foreground colour, and the right mouse button erased to the background colour. An irregularly-shaped part of an image could be picked up as a ‘brush’ (that’s where Guybrush Threepwood’s first name comes from) and scaled, rotated and stamped multiple times into the image. This setup made many common operations extremely quick to carry out. DPaint’s major shortcoming from a modern perspective is that it lacks the concept of layers, making it fiddly to temporarily move around and overlap objects.

Later versions allowed brushes to be manipulated in 3D space (useful for roughing out the perspective in scenes), and even to pick up multiple frame brushes (animbrushes) that worked like a flickbook that could be painted into an animated scene. It was this ability to easily duplicate animated sprites that led to the creation of the test animations that would be the inspiration for Lemmings.

In addition to drawing, DPaint had very powerful tools for managing the indexed colour palette. When games could only use 256 (or even 32 or 16) colours on screen, it was vital to be able to make sure that all the graphics were being created with the same assumptions about what colours would be available. DPaint also supported popular programmatic tricks like colour cycling. This was the method of rotating some of the colour indices in the palette, resulting in those colours being changed in the image. (Good examples of this effect are the campfire scene at the start of Monkey Island 2, the title screen of Defender of the Crown, and the waves on the beach in round six of Streets of Rage 2.)

There were also tools to chop images into grids (useful for making tile sheets), blur colours together, recolour areas (without changing their shading), and to add various cheesy-looking gradient fills (used extensively in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis). DeluxePaint Animation (the most widely-used PC version) even included a very rudimentary morphing feature, which can be seen in action in Monkey Island 2 when Guybrush’s parents ‘melt’ into dancing skeletons.

Deluxe Paint eventually fell out of favour as raytracing, digitisation and ultimately polygonal 3D reduced the importance of hand-drawn pixel art in games. During its heyday, it’s hard to estimate exactly how great an impact it had, although it’s difficult to imagine LucasArts’s more ambitious games having been possible from an art perspective without a de facto standard tool like DPaint having already been established. I think that it’s safe to say that DPaint was an innovation that expanded the boundaries of what was possible in the medium, in the same way that oil paint in tubes freed 19th Century artists from the studio, and digital video is currently democratising the film-making and editing process.

Addendum: As this post is celebrating an overlooked influence on game development, it’s also worth mentioning at least one of the most prolific artists who used it. Avril Harrison not only created the iconic Tutankhamun mask image (above) used to promote all versions of Deluxe Paint, but also contributed art to a diverse range of games including Prince of Persia, Toejam & Earl, Zombies Ate My Neighbours and both of the original Monkey Island games.

Later, Wikipedia (and a plethora of gaming-themed wikis) came along, but the nature of wikis has meant that the formatting and quality of entries has always been wildly inconsistent. General-purpose wikis just can’t be easily searched and filtered as data. Elsewhere, small groups of enthusiasts have been working on databases such as Hall of Light and World of Spectrum, which exhaustively catalogue the software available for a single hardware platform only.

More industrious people than I had also noticed that this problem was still unsolved, among them Vince Broady and Jeff Gerstmann (both formerly of GameSpot), who in 2008 launched Giant Bomb. Billed as “the world’s largest editable video game database”, Giant Bomb has two immediate advantages over MobyGames and everything else that has come before: firstly, it’s running on a sane, modern software platform (based on Django), and secondly the administrators have put a huge amount of thought into the structure and extensibility of the database, ensuring that entries can be tagged and connected to other entries in meaningful ways with the minimum of duplication and clutter. For instance, for any game it’s possible to see a breakdown of all the published SKUs, or to easily find games which use the same rendering engine or feature the same characters, or any other useful criteria the contributors include.

The site is not without problems. Adding and editing data is still a little clunky and unintuitive (albeit nowhere near as daunting as trying to add a game from scratch to Wikipedia). The “Concepts” and “Objects” tag categories, while flexible, are full of frivolous entries (do we really need to tag every game that features “Gravity”?), suggesting that the site’s XP system might be weighted too much towards rewarding busywork rather than adding useful information. The site currently sells t-shirts riffing on this (”Space Neon Lobsters That Have to Work Cooperatively”). It also has a really ugly logo.

From my perspective, having been closely involved with the mobile games sector for several years (biassss!), the lack of a generic “Mobile Games” platform category on the site seems like a glaring omission. At present there are only categories for iPhone and N-Gage. A simple Mobile category could be used as a catch-all for games released for J2ME, BREW, Symbian, DoJa, Blackberry, WinCE and other platforms not beholden to a single device or manufacturer, which prior to the launch of the iPhone App Store made up the vast majority of releases (and still represent a large market even today, especially among demographics who aren’t well served by the expensive, credit card-tied iPhone – such as children, teenagers and casual users).

I’ve pointed this omission out a couple of times (on their forum and via Jeff’s twitter), but they are adamant that such a category wouldn’t work.

Their main beef with the idea is that mobile games are typically released in many different variants to support different handsets and operating systems, and that because the experience of the game may not be consistent between devices, it is difficult to usefully review them. (Giant Bomb is an American site, and as such its staff lack first hand experience of the mobile situation in Europe and elsewhere in the world, where free annual upgrades are common and users aren’t locked into buying content from the carrier only, and where as a result mobile games tend to ‘just work’ and to be ubiquitously available.)

The Giant Bomb database already has categories for “PC” and “Arcade”, which make no distinction about hardware architecture or operating system, even though these vary wildly within said categories. (The even have a “Pinball” category, for goodness’s sake.) It also has categories for digital distribution platforms (such as the aforementioned iPhone App Store, as well as Xbox Live Arcade and DSiWare), which punctures any argument that mobile games are too “transient” to cover. If a publisher decides to remove a game from a digital distribution platform then that’s it, there’s no longer any legal way to obtain it.

Jeff also argued that there would be “no interest” in such a category (even though many hit mobile games have sold in the millions, and that Giant Bomb already has categories for dozens of ridiculously obscure legacy consoles). He also suggested that it would cause undue “clutter”. It’s true that (as with Flash, the iPhone, and other platforms where the barriers to entry are low) there are many thousands of unremarkable mobile games that someone looking to harvest XP could ostensibly spend days of their lives entering into the database, but this doesn’t seem to have happened for other formats with large, junk-filled software libraries (such as the PC, Playstation 2 or Game Boy Advance).

So what’s missing from the Giant Bomb database as a result of this decision? Quite a few interesting things, as it happens. Most of the output of Glu (Transformers, Super Monkey Ball), Gameloft (Might & Magic, Zombie Infection), Digital Chocolate (Tower Bloxx, Rollercoaster Rush) and EA Mobile (Tetris, SimCity) for one thing. John Carmack’s (definitely notable, and highly commercially successful) mobile experiments such as Orcs & Elves and Doom RPG. Most of the early works of 5th Cell, developers of the eagerly-anticipated Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts, were mobile-only. Scores of original games by most of the major Japanese development houses (Konami, Capcom, Sega, Sony, Namco – with the obvious exception of Nintendo). Lots of ports or clever adaptations of games from other platforms, from God of War to Archon to Puzzle Quest. And Nokia’s Snake, of course, one of the most widely-played games in history.

Giant Bomb are right to point out that there is a lot of rubbish released in the wild, woolly, largely review- and demo-less world of mobile games, but after ten years there is also a lot of notable stuff as well. If you want more examples, just check out Pocket Gamer’s reviews archive.

If Giant Bomb’s over-riding aim is to be a repository of user reviews, then I don’t suppose that anything I can say can convince them to change their minds. I think that aiming to make the site a definitive reference source is a separate aim, and one that can’t be arbitrarily restricted to certain platforms if it wants to succeed in the long term.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw, again

In the previous post, I complained about the Dead Space franchise, and the prevalence of “pot-boilers” in publisher’s catalogues – games that tick genre boxes but don’t set their sights on doing anything genuinely exciting and new. A few years ago, these games would have taken the form of direct imitations of successful titles, such as the glut of mediocre Doom, C&C and GTA clones. These days developers are more likely to cherry pick ideas from several different games, but the net result is the same.

With so much of the industry engaged in this kind of short-term thinking, is it possible to find a counter-example – a studio that is actually trying to challenge the status quo whose projects are part of a more sophisticated long-term plan than to just make incrementally improved sequels?

I think there are at least a few companies for whom a strong case could be pleaded. One of these is Dundee’s Real Time Worlds (RTW). They are currently working on an online action game for the PC called APB, due for release some time in 2010.

Sometimes described as a “massively multiplayer” action game, APB sits somewhere between Phantasy Star Online and Diablo and a true MMO virtual world. Each server hosts a city-sized, real-time urban arena (akin to the cities in GTA, or RTW’s previous game, Crackdown) which can support a maximum of 100 players at any one time. Player characters’ stats, property (weapons and vehicles), appearance and so forth are persistent.

Each player must decide whether to align themselves with law enforcement or criminal gangs, and will be encouraged to cooperate with other players to form clans and alliances. The game then uses information about the players’ skill levels to dynamically assign missions to groups of players (shades of Left4Dead or City of Heroes here). So, for example, a single highly-notorious criminal could have waves of low-level police players sent to intercept them, or vice versa.

RTW are putting a massive amount of work into the tools available to the player to customise their avatar, with the stated goal being to allow players to look sufficiently distinctive to be recognisable without a name tag floating over their heads. The value of this cannot be overstated, and I strongly suspect that other online games will quickly follow their lead.

My anticipation for APB is stronger than for any PC game of the last decade (with the possible exception of GTA III). There are several reasons for this. Most obviously, the game could be interpreted as being an attempt to make a massively multiplayer GTA, something which “hardcore” gamers have been wishing for for years. Even if the gameplay diverges radically from the GTA template, the subject matter (modern/near-future urban guerrilla warfare) and its attendant technical challenges are much more compelling than the usual PC game settings of medieval fantasy, science fiction or military simulation.

Looking at the long-term picture, APB could be seen as an evolutionary step (from Crackdown) towards an even more ambitious ultimate goal: a revolutionary MMORPG based on a real-time simulation model and set in a dense, realistic environment rather than a series of terrain maps with some scattered buildings, and where player characters are more than ambulatory mannequins for increasingly expensive equipment.

If this is really what they’re shooting for (and I’ve not just misread the signs through wishful thinking), it underlines the genius of Dave Jones (the mind responsible for Lemmings and GTA) and the RTW team. They rejected the rules of the existing MMO market, which dictated that funding and revenue were only available to games that slavishly followed World of Warcraft’s conventions. (Oddly, sticking to these rules hasn’t stopped Mythic’s Paul Barnett from being elevated to the status of a living god by the PC games media, but I digress.) Instead, they have set out to invent, in phases, the necessary technology to support a more game-like MMO, while at the same time slowly acclimatising online gamers to the idea that such a game would be desirable.

If they’d started out by trying to make the game-after-APB, it would probably have been rejected by gamers out of hand for not being like WoW, assuming it even reached the market in the first place (which the majority of MMOs still don’t). If they instead wait until gamers have been equipped with the necessary semiotics by Crackdown and APB, they’ll not only accept the third game but be champing at the bit for it. They’re trying to do to the MMO what the “movie brat” directors did to Hollywood in the 1970s.

(Another pet theory of mine: A good indicator of the level of latent demand for an urban/modern/real-time MMORPG is The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex. Lacking the technology to make a virtual world to house the Deus Ex forum community, they have instead built a vast single-player maquette populated with NPC versions of themselves.)

There are some parts of the APB master plan that I’m sceptical about. The city environment is intentionally quite spartan compared to the player and vehicle models, which could limit the game’s appeal to virtual tourists. RTW have also talked about basing their post-release development direction on player feedback. Hopefully they won’t put too much stock into player demands, which will largely consist of making the game easier and fixing imaginary balance issues (but I’m sure they’ve all read Better Than Life and don’t need to be told this). If the game is a success, it will inevitably be extended over time, giving RTW ample opportunities to enrich the game world and experiment with different gameplay directions.

I’m starting to suspect that World of Warcraft is becoming a tar pit for many people who used to care passionately about games. WoW addicts drift away from the mainstream, no longer keeping up to date with new developments, and not making their voices heard in the discourse. The ideas and values of the games they grew up with ten or fifteen years ago have no-one to champion them, and (with a few exceptions, like the recent Monkey Island revival) the trails have been left to go cold. As a result a lot of time is being wasted repeating mistakes and chasing distorted versions of what gamers want. I think that if the only MMORPG to successfully challenge WoW in the next five years is another Blizzard game, that would be a real tragedy. This is the final reason that I want APB to succeed – to liberate some of those bright, creative people from the WoW treadmill and get MMOs back on track.

Here are some links to recent coverage of APB:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4062/leading_the_design_of_apb.php
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/06/08/rps-at-e3-apb/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/07/16/develop-09-vg247-vs-mr-jones-on-apb/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/jul/16/games-pc

“Criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic. The artist who accounts for my disparagement by alleging personal animosity on my part is quite right: when people do less than their best, and do that less at once badly and self-complacently, I hate them, loathe them, detest them, long to tear them limb from limb and strew them in gobbets about the stage.”

George Bernard Shaw

I think we can assume that if he were alive today George Bernard Shaw would not be making a living previewing computer games. Previews are all about cautious optimism. Publications don’t want to dash their readers’ hopes of forthcoming games before they’ve had a chance to read the full review. Nor is it unheard of for a game to improve dramatically in the time between journalists seeing an unfinished preview version and the final article (sometimes as a result of feedback from previewers and beta testers). The main purpose of a preview is raising awareness and answering the most likely questions – strict editorial judgement (hopefully) comes later.

While this is all perfectly reasonable (even though it apparently came as an astounding revelation to some people who’ve presumably never read a games magazine in their lives), it doesn’t really look at the big picture. Developers are seldom asked why they’ve decided to make a particular game, and whether in artistic terms that’s the right direction to go in. Probably because these are quite pseudy questions.

Regardless, in the next two posts, I’m going to look at two forthcoming games (neither of which I’ve played yet) and try to explain why the mere concept of one of them fills me with irrational fury, while the other fills me with giddy hope for the future of the medium.

The first of these games is Dead Space Extraction, a Wii exclusive spin-off from last year’s PC/360/PS3 survival horror game Dead Space. The game’s ‘unique selling points’ are summarised in this promotional video.

I thought the original first Dead Space game was a competent technical exercise, which was given a ludicrously easy ride by most of the games media. There were several contributing factors to this. Firstly, the game was released at a time where there was no game on the Xbox 360 or PS3 equivalent to Resident Evil 4, tempting many outlets (particularly single-format ones) to hail the game as a viable alternative to said classic, rather than the pale imitation it actually was. Secondly, it was a case of Dancing Bear syndrome – expectations of the developers (who had previously mainly worked on film license adaptations) were so low that the fact that they delivered anything vaguely playable was treated as a minor miracle. Thirdly (and most importantly), EA had already decided that Dead Space was going to be a “pop culture brand”, which would be given the full Star Wars merchandising treatment, with the PR spend that that entailed. (So far there have been entirely perfunctory comics and an animated movie, and there will no doubt be action figures, novels, card games and lunch boxes, despite the fact that the “franchise” has not one single memorable or marketable character.)

While I stress that Dead Space wasn’t a complete disaster of Rise of the Robots proportions, it’s impossible that it will ever be remembered as a classic. The game is utterly generic, calculated, derivative, manufactured. It’s the Monkees* to Resi’s Beatles. It has no reason to exist beyond a higher-up at EA seeing Bioshock’s sales figures and instructing a minion to “make one of those”. It’s a game that I can’t imagine anyone waking up in the morning and being enthusiastic to work on (apart from the sound team, whose contribution is genuinely outstanding – and almost completely wasted on an endless stream of cheap scares and featureless environments). The main character is a non-entity, and the scant supporting cast lack believable motives or a single personality between them.

Simply put, it’s a pot-boiler. A game that could have been made better, or even given the slightest indication that it had been worked on by human beings, but one where the developers decided the minimum effort was “good enough”. (For a more detailed dissection of the game including hilarious gameplay examples, I recommend this review. Yes, it’s Tim Rogers, but his fruity elitist persona is really the only reasonable means of responding to a game which is mainly about endlessly stomping on corpses in dramatically lit metal rooms.)

So I didn’t like Dead Space very much. But why should I have such a downer on Dead Space Extraction? Surely I should be praising EA for putting their support behind an big-budget “mature” Wii exclusive? The main problem I have with it is that they’ve decided from the outset that because they’re working with a less powerful machine they’re justified in offering a lesser game. This is just inexcusable. It’s the complete opposite to the commendable stance Rockstar took with Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, where they tried their damnedest to squeeze the full home console game into a workable handheld format, and by and large succeeded.

Dead Space Extraction is (presumably) going to launch at full price, just as Dead Space did. It is presumably having a significant budget spent on it. It is being released on a platform that has seen at least two technically solid, artistically accomplished and commercially successful action adventure games (Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime 3 Corruption), which the developers must be aware of, seeing as how Dead Space cribbed heavily from both. In spite of all this, it’s going to be an on-rails shooter. It could turn out to be a great on-rails shooter (although House of the Dead Overkill has already set the bar very high for the genre on Wii), but it will still always carry the stigma of being a spin-off, created because the developers were too timid, lazy and risk-averse to make a fully-fledged action-adventure game for the Wii.

If, in spite of these handicaps (as well as the absurdly dialled-down visuals, terrible voice acting and the ‘glow worm’ mechanic which is surely destined to be more annoying than Doom 3’s torch) the game turns out to be spectacularly brilliant, I fully accept that I will be left with egg on my face. However, if it turns out to be a critical and/or commercial flop, you can guarantee that the developers will smugly claim that this proves that “mature” games don’t sell on the Wii, even though they’ve done almost everything in their power to sabotage the game’s chances from the outset. Then they’ll go on releasing Dead Space games (and DVDs, socks, bedspreads, etc. etc.) until even one person outside of the development team describes themselves as a “Dead Space fan”, or (more likely) a bad fiscal quarter prompts someone at EA to make a list of underperforming projects to cancel.

The Wii deserves to have action games that at least try to compete with the cream of what’s available on the platform already. With The Conduit reviewing poorly and Dead Space Extraction looking likely to not even bother, my hopes currently rest warily on Ubisoft’s forthcoming Red Steel 2. I am still convinced in the potential of the Wii’s control scheme, but the outlook for new games that actually realise that potential for the moment looks very bleak.

*Except The Monkees were amazing, of course.

It must be incredibly frustrating for a developer to deliver a game that convincingly nails its design goals, only to see it flounder in the marketplace for reasons beyond their control. This sometimes happens when another game in the publisher’s portfolio has become a smash hit, leading everything else to be neglected regardless of quality. In other cases, the staff who set up and evangelised the project go elsewhere and their replacements don’t share their enthusiasm. Or it could simply be that the game targets a platform or genre where the publisher lacks experience. It’s this last scenario that seems to have soured the fortunes of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Rockstar Games’s first title for the Nintendo DS.

If we consider the hesitant way in which it has been marketed, combined with assumptions about the technical capabilities of the host platform, it’s likely that many potential purchasers have been led to assume that Chinatown Wars is a spin-off sharing no similarities to the 3D GTA games beyond the brand name. The packaging features softer, more cartoon-like artwork than most of the GTA games and a single, thumbnail-sized screenshot of the in-game graphics on the reverse. Even in screenshots and video, the game looks far removed from GTA IV or the rest of the 3D GTAs, lacking the rich colours, iconic screen furniture and sweeping cityscapes that have been the series’s hallmarks since GTA III.

Let’s set this straight once and for all: GTA:CW is a 3D GTA game. It is not a return to the presentation and game mechanics of the 2D GTAs. In mechanical terms, the game plays extremely similarly to GTA III or Vice City (except with the benefit of many new features and refinements, such as being able to restart missions easily and save anywhere). The main technical differences are the camera (which has a locked pitch, limiting the required drawing distance as the game has no LOD system) and the use of sprites instead of polygons for all the little people. There are also no flyable aircraft or 3D building interiors, and cut-scenes are presented in text and still images rather than voiced, motion-captured animations. Aside from that, everything you can do with a weapon, car, bike or boat in the home console GTAs is present and correct in Chinatown Wars.

Rockstar Leeds have examined each element of the GTA gameplay and considered how it could be adapted to the DS controls. There’s a subtle level of steering assistance that lines the player’s car up with the road, obviating a lot of small steering tweaks when turning corners. More significantly, the process of stealing cars has been made more strategic. It’s now possible to hot-wire parked cars (in the form of a brief touchscreen minigame), completely evading police detection at the cost of a few seconds of fiddling about. To balance this, jacking a moving vehicle now attracts police attention in the majority of cases. Additionally, the constrained viewpoint makes it easier to accidentally run over pedestrians or ding police cars. As a result, quite a lot of the time the player will have at least a single-star wanted level.

This is where the game’s mechanics deviate most significantly from GTA tradition. Losing a high wanted level no longer requires driving through ‘bribe’ icons or getting your car resprayed. It’s now possible to lose your wanted level by totalling police cruisers, tricking them into crashing into lampposts and walls in true Blues Brothers / Dukes of Hazzard fashion. While this doesn’t make a great deal of logical sense and removes some of the tension of the cops and robbers dynamic, it does mean that going on a five-star rampage doesn’t inevitably end in arrest or death.

The process of earning money has also been heavily reworked. Performing side missions (taxi driving, firefighting, etc.), robbing people and even completing the main story missions now only offer meagre cash rewards. The game makes it clear that the only way to make serious money in Liberty City is through the new drug dealing system.

This works very similarly to trading goods in Elite. There are 80 dealers hidden around the city, who each offer different selling and buying prices for the game’s six illicit commodities. It’s possible to figure out general trends of which gangs favour which substances, but the fastest way to make money through the system is to follow daily email tip-offs highlighting extremely high buying and low selling prices which are only offered for a limited time. Trying to pull off large deals can also result in police raids, immediately bumping up the wanted level and leaving the player scrambling to get their haul to a safe-house. It’s also possible to hijack rival gangs’ vans to steal their deliveries. These rules create an addictive trade-off of risk and reward. Whenever the player is carrying drugs on their person they risk losing them if they’re busted, heightening the tension whenever the police are alerted.

The story missions benefit from the stripped down game mechanics. There are no street races that degenerate into blind luck thanks to random traffic, no radio controlled helicopters or other half-baked novelty vehicles, and mercifully few escort missions involving fragile vehicles or suicidal AI wingmen. It could be argued that this streamlining goes too far, as many of the later missions boil down to taking a specific vehicle or weapon and killing a set number of attackers. Lots of missions involve one-shot touchscreen minigames (assembling a sniper rifle, arming bombs, tattooing gang members) which add variety without feeling too contrived.

The final mission brings together all the skills that the player has acquired in a frantic chase sequence which is perhaps the best-designed mission I’ve played in a GTA game. In fact this is the only GTA game in which I’ve felt compelled to finish the story missions, probably because it’s the first one where they actually appear to have been play-tested to any degree. The game also gives you the option to replay any mission that you’ve completed. While this is a nice touch, this is still GTA, not Hitman – you can either complete a mission or fail and there’s no incentive to revisit missions such as getting a better ranking or trying different tactics.

With the story missions completed, the game does feel a little empty. There are still the obligatory Rampages, Unique Stunt Jumps, side missions (checkpoint races and the brilliant “Hobotron” – an arena combat game pitting the player against waves of angry tramps) and Easter Egg hunt (locate and destroy 100 CCTV cameras), but the city is quite tightly packed and there’s not a lot of scope for exploration. Drug dealing makes it easy to hoard more money than you can spend. Most of the safe-houses are cheap enough to snap up over the course of the story and weapons and vehicles are negligibly priced and disposable. It would have been nice to have more status symbols (or even abilities) to collect, and more ways to personalise your avatar, vehicles or property.

The graphical limitations take the edge off causing random chaos and police chases. While this aspect of the game is still exciting, it doesn’t provide the same kind of spectacle as the home console versions with their free camera, greater verticality and multi-vehicular pileups. While the 3D engine (and the assets it uses) are visually pleasing (with a day/night cycle, varying weather, and some surprisingly intricate building models), the same can’t be said of the 2D art. The still images used in cut-scenes are indistinct and ugly, seemingly created by taking screenshots of crude 3D models. The effect is reminiscent of the Ubisoft’s XIII, but somehow even uglier. The art used for the touchscreen interludes is similarly cheap-looking, all flat colours and right angles like something out of a bad cartoon-licensed SNES game. Perhaps loading times or memory constraints are to blame, but the 2D graphics jar badly with the quality of the 3D ones.

While the game includes a selection of radio stations playing licensed music (all instrumental), there are no longer any spoof commercials or comedy skits. This absence is (poorly) compensated for in the form of spam emails. The script used in the story missions is uninspiring. None of the characters are particularly likeable, and the dialogue constantly falls back on expletives, single-entendres and self-deprecation without ever being witty or assured enough to get away with it. Luckily there are still a few flashes of the unapologetically silly humour that distinguishes GTA from the myriad clones. (What other game would name a gang of Korean assassins the “Wonsu Nodong”?)

Even with all the bad language and drug references I find it peculiar that the game has somehow managed to earn itself a BBFC 18 certificate. The (textual) swearing is no worse than many 15-rated films. The “drug references” amount to stylised icons in the trading interface, not Trainspotting-style graphic, instructive depictions of drug use. The violence in the cut-scenes is no worse than many (obviously unrated) superhero comics, and in the game itself amounts to eight-pixel-tall stickmen falling over in red blobs. And yet in the BBFC’s eyes this is equivalent to Saw or Manhunt 2.

Rough edges and weak writing aside, one has to admire what Rockstar have achieved with this game. I wouldn’t have thought you could get so close to the console GTA games on the DS, nor that they would have gone to such lengths to adapt the GTA blueprint to work on a handheld. The key to the game’s success as a handheld title is the realisation that challenge should be sought out. Outside of the story missions the game isn’t geared towards punishing the casual player. It’s fun to dip into but has enough deeper content to allow for longer sessions of more structured play. I’d recommend the game to anybody who has enjoyed the best parts of the other GTA games (i.e. treating them as a sandbox), with the above-average story missions being an added bonus.

As these are the first attempts at a motion control system of this level of complexity, and because they’re patched together on top of existing technology, it’s likely that none of them represents the final stage in this particular arms race. In a few years time the console manufacturers will be able to look back on what worked and what didn’t and synthesise these elements into a new pseudo-standard, much as the various joypad controllers gravitated towards subtle variations on the Dual Shock.

Below are some thoughts on the possible strengths and weaknesses of each offering at this early stage. Of course the true test will be whether developers can find good uses for these tools and whether consumers can be persuaded to buy into them. The reception Wii Sports Resort has seen so far suggests that there is still an appetite for new control experiences.

Nintendo: Wii Motion Plus

Pros:

• The Wii Remote can already be used as a pointing device, giving the system a technological head start.
• Nintendo are actively pushing Motion Plus as an upgrade (not a fork), bundling it with games and new systems.
• Relatively cheap hardware.
• First to market.

Cons:

• Might not offer as much freedom of motion as the other systems, where relative position is being tracked by a static camera. (The Wii Remote needs to be pointed at the screen for the camera tracking to work.)
• Some demos suggest that the device might need to be manually calibrated (but hopefully not every time it’s used).

Summary:

With strong software and an aggressive rollout, Motion Plus’s commercial success is assured, but it’s missing the ‘wow factor’ of the rival systems. It remains to be seen if it can match the precision and freedom of motion of Sony’s demo, but on the other hand it might turn out that it’s still ‘good enough’ (as the Wii Remote was) even if you can’t perform zero-gravity heart surgery with it.

Sony: “Motion Controller”

Pros:

• Extremely high level of precision.
• Traditional genres being targeted, not just casual.
• Acknowledges that buttons are still desirable.

Cons:

• A risk that it could be dumped on the market without sufficient support.
• As far as we know, isn’t backward compatible with the Dual Shock controls, so there will be some forking.
• How many players can it track?

Summary:

The Motion Controller seems to tick all the boxes in terms of pure mechanical functionality, being precise enough to use as a pointing device in 2D and 3D. If the camera resolution is high enough it might even be possible to use it with small movements. The nagging worry is that the system could be rushed out as a Natal spoiler without sufficient software support. Hopefully Sony will have learnt from PSN and the revival of the PSP that it’s sometimes necessary to put their weight behind a product rather than leaving it to third parties to grow organically.

Microsoft: “Project Natal”

Pros:

• Focus on immediacy and accessibility will help sell it to the existing Wii Sports / Wii Fit audience.
• The only system that supports full body tracking.
• Wider feature set (voice and face recognition) could be used in tandem to ’suggest’ it’s cleverer than it is (see: Wii Sports).
• Integration with the system dashboard.

Cons:

• Probably not precise enough to work as a pointing device (compare the Microsoft and Sony live demos, particularly the paint programs).
• Positioned as a seperate, specialised control scheme instead of a replacement for or extension of the standard one.
• Esoteric features may not offer tangible benefits to most games, and end up being used in gimmicky ways (like the DS microphone).

Summary:

Project Natal has a bad case of ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome, as if the Xbox team have been told that they need to make something that replicates the success of Wii Fit, but are determined to keep it at arm’s length from their existing business. I suppose if you spend years trying to play down the potential of motion control there’s going to be a risk that you start believing your own spin.

Getting Steven Spielberg and Peter Molyneux to make extravagant claims may be enough to impress idiots, but developers don’t think motion control is a gimmick – they know that being able to manipulate an end effector in 3D space is fundamentally more powerful and versatile than struggling with the limitations of the decade-old joypad. Still, as Natal is many months away from release, it’s possible that Microsoft will revise their plans based on what they’ve now seen of their competitor’s offerings.

(P.S.: I look forward to seeing OnLive’s executives trying to downplay the fact that their rubbish imaginary system won’t support any of these controllers.)

The highlight of the presentation for me was the unveiling of Microsoft’s new controller peripheral, codenamed “Project Natal”. This device could be summed up as Eyetoy on steroids. It was presumably commissioned as a response to the Wii Remote and Wii Fit (the runaway success of the latter no doubt emboldening Microsoft to consider an expensive peripheral that is sold separately from the console).

The technology that was shown (gesture, voice and face recognition) was undoubtedly impressive. But as the demonstration went on I began to suspect that the strategists who had overseen it (the same people who were up on stage last year enthusing about Lips, Scene It! and You’re in the Movies perhaps?) have tried to find rationales for the technologists’ ideas rather than making decisions from the users’ perspective.

The Wii Remote wasn’t a success because it had a long feature list. Like the Walkman, it was a product of taking away anything that got in the way of the core functionality. The result was a device general enough to support almost any existing game genre (fighting and racing games being problematic), while still offering enough accessible motion-based control to be engaging to a non-gaming audience. Essentially, it’s a mouse you can use from the sofa.

Wii sceptics love to characterise the Wii’s controls by going on about “waggle”, as if every game forces you to shake the controller violently every five seconds. The reality is that developers can use the motion controls for good or evil. Super Mario Galaxy uses them all over the place, and it would be hard to argue that the game would benefit from (or be unaffected by) their removal.

Project Natal, by comparison, bins off most of the Xbox 360’s key genres. I can’t imagine playing an FPS with it. Not only will games have to be radically retooled to support it properly (and all of this fancy technology is likely to be more resource hungry than tracking a couple of dots and accelerometers), but players will also have to adapt their behaviour to accommodate it.

All the worst-case scenarios that people feared with the Wii Remote (that you’d have to hold your arms out and perform exhausting physical gestures) seem to be a reality with Natal. We see a ‘mum’ holding out her arms to drive an imaginary steering wheel. A ‘family’, sitting, silently, close together, in plain view of the camera, rigidly miming gameshow buzzers with both hands. A ‘couple’ extraordinarily labouriously navigating a menu of videos and turning the machine off by saying “goodbye”. A lot of protocol, and for what pay-off? The supposed ‘inconvenience’ of having to physically hold/stand on a controller hasn’t stopped tens of millions of new gamers from buying into Wii Sports and Wii Fit.

We’re left with unanswered questions about lighting and calibration (the bane of previous camera-based systems). It’s annoying enough having to get an idling Wii Remote to ‘find’ the screen again, it could be even more aggravating to have a system that’s forever being distracted by unconscious movements and noise. Perhaps the technology is robust enough that these won’t be issues, but we weren’t given a live demonstration that proves this yet.

I think that any console control system that gets away from the dual-stick joypad is a step in the right direction, but unless you can sit back on the sofa and use Natal to move a cursor as easily and accurately as you can with the Wii Remote, it’s probably an evolutionary dead end as a general purpose controller. But then the Wii Fit board or the Rock Band guitar aren’t general purpose controllers either – I expect that there will be Natal-specific games of some kind or another that justify its existence.