I’m slightly surprised that I’ve never written anything on this blog about PC Zone, a magazine which I took for over a decade from its launch in 1993, and which was my favourite games magazine for much of that time.

All the eulogies of the magazine that I’ve seen have dwelt on a handful of controversies that occurred during a ‘Maxim-esque’ phase of the magazine’s life in the late 1990s (coverdisk porn, joystick-groping nuns, banned cartoon strips and prank phonecalls, the latter two being the work of a pre-media-moguldom Charlie Brooker, whose moderately successful stint at the magazine has predictably gained a legendary status).

Conventional wisdom has it that PC Zone was more puerile and lightweight than the more respectable PC Gamer. There’s a grain of truth in this, but the laddish reputation tends to overshadow the fact that PC Zone contained a lot of very good, innovative and influential writing.

PC Zone could trace its roots back through Game Zone (short-lived multiformat console mag now primarily remembered for employing Jonathon Ross’s wife Jane Goldman), Zero (startlingly ahead-of-its-time ‘lifestyle’ games magazine which regularly gave over a third of its editorial to anything its extensive pool of writers were interested in, from comics to film trivia to band interviews), and the venerable Your Sinclair. It was the UK’s first dedicated PC games magazine.

PC Zone mk. 1 (edited by ‘Lord’ Paul Lakin) was essentially a more mature extension of Zero. At that time, buying a £1,500+ PC purely for entertainment was unheard of, so Zone’s tone was very much aimed towards 25-45 year old professional males with a technical bent. Many PC games at the time were fairly stodgy, text-heavy adventures or in-depth military sims, which Zone made the most out of – peppering reviews with summaries of games’ inspirations and source material, and getting an actual pilot (whose name temporarily escapes me, but I don’t think was Zero flyboy Marcus ‘Binky’ Berkmann) to review flight sims for authenticity.

Early PC Zone’s single most inspired idea was to give Duncan MacDonald the task of writing a light-hearted back page column from the perspective of a PC gamer who wasn’t a brainiac PC buff. Entitled “Mr Cursor (He’s afraid of his PC)”, these columns rapidly deviated from talking about PCs and games, becoming a series of increasingly bizarre and hilarious anecdotes/shaggy dog stories.

MacDonald’s writing was frequently gaspingly hilarious. Charlie Brooker may have been able to craft scatological metaphors for England, but MacDonald could turn a simple comment into concentrated hilarity simply through the judicious use of inverted commas. (“I’m sort of ‘magic’, you see…”, “Let’s say you decided to have an ‘experiment’ on holiday in Crete…”)

Animals were a recurring theme. One episode involved preparing and cooking cockroaches, another recounted a scheme to clean a carpet using dung beetles stolen from London Zoo (which backfires when the beetles are eaten by pigeons, who crap everywhere). One of the most memorable and extraordinary columns recounted Mr Cursor’s attempt to discover the resolution of a half-remembered Jacques Cousteau documentary in which the question was posed “Do octopusees ‘ave orgasms?“, by supplying readers with a cut-out-and-post form which read (and I paraphrase):

“I can confirm/deny that octopuses have orgasms, on the authority that (tick one):

A: I also saw the Jacques Cousteau programme in question and remember the ending
B: I am a marine biologist specialising in octopus reproduction
C: I am a Cretian pervert”

Another column circa 1994 gave an almost eerily prescient description of a future “online interactive movie” where thousands of players were embroiled in an intergalactic war, not entirely unlike EVE Online. (But then there was also the month when he supposedly built an A.I. facsimile of John Kettley.) Mr Cursor lasted for the first four years or so of the magazine, after which Duncan MacDonald worryingly disappeared from the scene entirely (briefly resurfacing to write the very Cursor-esque South Coast Diaries web series in 2001).

The other writer who gave PC Zone a distinctive voice in the early days was David McCandless, nowadays best known for his popularisation of quirky, artistic infographics (collected in his book Information is Beautiful). Another veteran of YS and Zero, ‘Macca’ championed a string of major PC gaming obsessions in the mag, most notably Star Control II, Ultima Underworld, Doom and Quake.

Doom was the first game to warrant coverage month after month beyond launch. McCandless took the obsession further than most, becoming the UK Doom champion, interviewing many key figures in the nascent e-sports and modding scenes, and ultimately striking up a close relationship with id Software.

PC Zone ‘got’ id’s games in a way that the slightly sniffy and condescending PC Gamer never could. McCandless’s 16 page review of Quake calmly (but menacingly) explained exactly why the game was a landmark (“Fucking Brilliant. 96%”) for PC gaming – that it didn’t matter that the single player campaign was rubbish, or that it lacked the gimmicks of Duke Nukem 3D, or that it ran slowly on old PCs, because it showed that native networked multiplayer games with extensible engines were the future for the PC, an argument which has now been proven a thousand times over.

Zone prospered in the boom time for PC gaming from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Under the editorship of Jon Davison (who had previously edited Games-X, and later went to work for 1UP, and as such can confidently identify Zone as the peak of his games writing career) the mag became more brash and boisterous, while contrastingly developing more rigourous reviewing standards. (Amiga Power-like refusals to bow to publisher pressure over their coverage of a Euro 96 football game and the notoriously rush-released Frontier First Encounters being commendable cases.)

The larks were eventually reined in by Everquest-junkie Chris Anderson circa 1997, under whose tenure (if memory serves) the mag was given a classier redesign and imposed a harsher marking scheme (under which a score of 90% had almost as much weight as an old Edge 10/10) for about a year. This was the era of the rise of Valve and Blizzard and the messy fall of Ion Storm, all of which were given extensive coverage.

At the turn of the century the magazine was being edited by Dave Woods, and most of the original contributors were fading into the background, replaced by a team including Paul Mallinson, Richie Shoemaker, Steve Hill, Phil Wand and Jeremy Wells. This was the era in which PC gaming started its slow decline into a market saturated with World War II shooters, fantasy RTSes and shortlived MMOs. It was also a period marred by some high profile reviewing blunders – proclaiming Black & White to be “a work of pure genius” on the basis of a slightly dubious exclusive review, and more embarrassingly scoring the execrable Unreal II 94% and implying that it was the best first person shooter ever made.

Around 2005 the mag was sold to Future Publishing and Jamie Sefton took over as editor. It was shortly before this that I allowed my subscription to lapse, having gotten sick of murky brown RTS games with interchangeable screenshots, and increasingly indulgent ‘Supertest’ round-table features. At the time I was sure that the magazine didn’t have long to live, and that it could only be a matter of time before it was canned or merged with stablemate PC Gamer.

Surprisingly, Zone somehow managed to survive for another five years with a dwindling readership (the internet having made print PC games mags and their cover discs largely obsolete), an ever-smaller and younger writing team and fewer pages. (A fate that closely mirrored that of Your Sinclair when that mag was bought out by Future 15 years ago.) I missed out on Jon ‘Log’ Blyth’s years on the magazine (unfortunate, as Log is perhaps the funniest games writer ever to have been ridden like a horse), and the rise of Rhianna Pratchett and Dan Marshall, who have gone on to do vaguely games-development-related things, and Will Porter, Steve Hogarty, Ali Wood and god knows who else.

And now after 17 years(!) it’s all over. It was never a perfect mag, but it was always one that went to great lengths to include its readers, that managed to communicate a massive enthusiasm for games that often didn’t have huge marketing budgets. It didn’t become an institution purely on the back of sticking around for longer than anyone else and having Charlie Brooker attempt to eat his arse for losing a bet.

I wish the last crew of PC Zone all the best in their future endeavours, and hope that some of those who read it over the years will attempt to keep its spirit alive, as a reminder that ‘mainstream’ games journalism didn’t always equate to dismal tabloid blogs like Kotaku and Games Radar.

Spurred on by the success of earlier UK indie game jams (including this one), Ricky “Honeyslug” Haggett, Terry “VVVVVV” Cavanagh and co. organised a weekend jam to coincide with Pixel-Lab’s World of Love indie development conference. In spite of my continued insistence that I can’t program, I went along, and even made a couple of (fairly awful) games. Over two dozen other gaming enthusiasts also showed up, including Eskil Steenberg and Kieron Gillen.

You can read my rather whimsical report on the event at Honeyslug’s site.

You can play the game I made as well as everyone else’s at Cambridge Friendship Club.

But please, do not play Vegetable Game.

David Wong’s schtick is to cook up superficially compelling arguments based on feel-good folk psychology that reinforce the reader’s prejudices on a subject. Synthetic profundity that sounds good until you analyse it in any detail. The most famous of these is the entertaining “What is the Monkeysphere?”.

Sporadically he applies this technique to the subject of video games. The reasoning behind this is unclear, as it’s obvious from even these infrequent excursions that Wong is only aware of games in terms of the few clumsily reported stories about them that penetrate the mainstream media.

The entire piece is underpinned by the ugly, divisive implication that “gamers” refers to a tribe of privileged American young men. It is (ironically) a perception of people who play games in the second decade of the 21st century taken straight from the ridiculous and clueless way in which they’ve been marketed in America for the past thirty years. American games magazines are full of these extraordinary relics, routinely depicting their target market as Bart Simpson-esque teenagers or bottle-glassed dorks who buy games explicitly because they contain obnoxiousness and gore.

His first point, “We Can’t Shake the “Lonely, Anti-Social Virgin” Stereotype” immediately and obliviously launches into a tirade against GameCrush, a service that was universally derided by even the most unreconstructed elements of the games media, where it wasn’t simply assumed to be a hoax. That some entrepreneur was clueless enough to assume that there would be a market for a convoluted phone sex service without the sex says nothing about the vast majority of gamers.

There are of course valid arguments to be made about the appalling level of sexism and other antisocial behaviour that ooze to the surface wherever people are allowed to communicate anonymously, but that’s as near as Wong gets to forming one. Some people behave badly online, some other mysterious people who it’s imperative that we impress rightly condemn them for it, so we should all feel bad. All the American college-aged guys, that is.

The second argument (“The Industry Thinks We’re All 17-Year-Old Douchebags”) is essentially a restatement of Wong’s misconception that ghastly American marketing reflects the views of either the creators or consumers of games, with a big fat side order of confused puritanism. The concepts of “kitsch”, “camp”, “exploitation” and creative works not being entirely earnest reflections of their creators’ beliefs (i.e. “fiction”) seem to have sailed over his head.

A sniffy appraisal of a sex scene from God of War (so shamelessly over the top that it’s genuinely bemusing that Wong would assume that its creators must be Beavis and Butthead at the height of their creative powers, rather than a team of respected, well-adjusted industry veterans taking the piss) is followed by still more bumbling context-deprived examples. (Um, no David, Sakura in Street Fighter IV is not a “grown woman in a Japanese schoolgirl fetish costume”.) Again and again it’s taken as implicit that you can’t have sexualised characters in a game without them being shameful and grubby.

The fact that the American retailers effectively banned any discussion of sexuality from mainstream games for years is infinitely more deplorable than any of the grievances in the article.

Wong has run out of steam by the third argument (“Video Game Storytelling is Still at the Level of B Movies”), so attempts to change the topic to one he’s more comfortable with (screenwriting). He characterises all game writing as awful on the basis of a handful of shooters where it is largely irrelevant. His entirely sound methodology for this sampling is to take a list of the top grossing Xbox 360 games (so story-led PS3 games like Uncharted 2 and Heavy Rain and PC games like every adventure game ever and Dwarf Fortress can be conveniently glossed over), which is like taking the top grossing airport carousel thrillers as a barometer of the state of literature. More sweeping generalisations follow, with more neuroticism about not being considered sophisticated.

Even if we dispense with Wong’s dishonestly selective sampling, most games writing is awful, I’ll admit. But when storytelling has worked in games (e.g. MGS, Machinarium, Ico, Mafia, Psychonauts, Spider, and stacks of Lucasarts, Infocom, Telltale, Valve and Bioware games) it’s been as good as anything in any other media. And that’s before we get on to player-generated stories – the real stories – it’s no coincidence that most of the games in that top-grossing list have extensive multiplayer modes.

Marching wearily on to the fourth argument (“We’re Still Obsessed by Shiny Gadgets”), Wong gives up the pretense of having a coherent theme to whine about graphics nerdery, delivering another daft and agonisingly protracted film analogy in the process. If you want to make an analogy, complaints about technical deficiencies in the long-awaited Alan Wake can be likened to complaints about a botched DVD transfer of a long out of print movie, among home cinema buffs who care about these things.

Wong’s assertion that the entire industry is obsessed with technical novelty to the exclusion of all else might have been plausible five or ten years ago. Today the majority of games are being played on the Wii, or on smartphones, or in browser windows, and bleeding edge technical showcases are if not quite a niche, a lucrative specialist market rather than the be all and end all.

At this point in the article, most of the attempts at humour have been bled out and replaced with strident, ill-informed histrionics. The nadir is the final point (“We Have Some Serious Entitlement Issues”), again a topic where many genuine grievances could be aired, but again one where Wong has just vented misplaced anger at something he doesn’t understand.

After some hand-wringing about piracy of the Humble Indie Bundle (based on the widespread confusion of the concepts of “value” and “worth” – giving something away makes it harder to justify paying for it, not easier), he lays the blame for Spore’s failure solely on piracy (spoiler: Spore was quite shit) and claims that PC gaming is dying, which is presumably why sites like Rock Paper Shotgun get so little traffic and can’t find anything to write about, and why Gabe Newell probably uses diamond-encrusted ancient Egyptian artifacts to scratch himself. (All those people without job titles in the credits of Valve games? Horrified archaeologists.)

Unforgivably, Wong has the gall to claim that consumer ire over issues such as Ubisoft’s disasterous DRM policy and Modern Warfare 2′s lack of dedicated servers (both cases where people are simply being asked to pay more money for less functionality – there is no room for interpretation there) can be dismissed as adolescent tantrums, which goes beyond misfiring comedy to being mildly offensive.

I can think of one group of people who are obsessed with being seen as mature, caring about approval from strangers, and whining about how terrible people are in response to utterly inconsequential perceived slights, and worrying about whether their hobbies are ‘cool’. It isn’t “gamers”. Maybe when David Wong has moved on from his self-imposed teenagerdom he’ll appreciate that.

My impressions of the atmosphere of the event are broadly similar to Kieron Gillen’s. There seemed to be less excitement and optimism than the last time.

Personally, large-scale gatherings of games people (‘for their own sake’ as opposed to LAN parties or trade shows) seem much less of a novelty than they did back in 2008. At the first GameCamp nobody knew what to expect. The number of bona fide gaming luminaries wandering about was startling, many of whom were sorely absent this time. (Not to say that this year’s lineup was entirely lacking – both Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson were there, for goodness’ sake.)

In the wake of the economic downturn, studio closures, the rise of Zynga, etc., it is perhaps only to be expected that our collective enthusiasm has been sapped over the last two years. (On the positive side, nobody was talking about ARGs.)

Gamecamp’s format works so well because the talks are informal, the audience can be assumed to be up to speed, and the subject matter can be literally anything. I attended these ones (ducking into others briefly):

• Emmeline Dobson gave a talk about why bullet hell shooters are great. And importantly for a PC-centric audience, why they’re accessible.
• James Wallis explored games as means of creative expression, where many of the crowd put forth their own anecdotes.
• Alice O’Connor tried to figure out how to make pro gaming watchable.
• Phill Cameron tackled procedural content generation (“Death of the Designer”!).
• Kieron Gillen talked about game narrative, and how it’s peculiarly different from other media.
• Some idiot-hole breathlessly tried to rattle off all the unjust conditions and remedial attitudes that are holding game back in 25 minutes.
• Margaret Robertson gave about a dozen talks, the one I caught being about the intriguing-sounding audio-only iPhone game Papa Sangre.
• Finally, there was a welcome return of the People’s Revolutionary Committee, where Farmville, crap sliding block puzzles, ludonarrative dissonance and Quick Time Events were sent to the wall.

All in all, it was a great success, and hopefully we won’t have to wait two years for another one. (There were some intriguing murmurs about revisiting the format under the Rock Paper Shotgun banner…)

Last weekend, a collective noun of UK indie games developers were invited to the North London home of Honeyslug‘s Ricky Haggett for an intensive two-day programme of designing and implementing experimental games.

Among the attendees were the host Ricky (Kahoots, Poto & Kabenga), Terry Cavanagh (Don’t Look Back, VVVVVV), Craig Forrester (Ishisoft), Elliot Curtis (Making Fun Games), Jim Riley, Adam Schofield and on piano accompaniment, Rob Haggett (The Slips).

Among such formidable company I felt a bit like someone turning up for a jam at Eric Clapton’s place with a kazoo, but my lack of practical coding ability (and, erm, a laptop) were quickly accommodated for, allowing me to spend the time pottering around with DeluxePaint and Klik ‘n’ Play.

The format was simple. A list of themes was collected from the participants (including “maps”, “chickens”, “sewing”, “umbrellas”, “bacon”, “chimneys” and… “chunting”?), and then selections were made from this list at random. There then began a three hour session in which everyone was to attempt to make games inspired by the chosen themes.

Saturday’s session spawned two completed games: Ricky’s Eyjafjallajoekull and Terry’s Kongregate-baiting defen. I understand that the Sunday session brought some other games near to completion, which may find their way onto the internet soon.

Having not attended any kind of ‘jam’ before, I was sceptical that anything substantial or interesting could be produced within such a brief timeframe. While the released games are rather lightweight and silly, the actual ‘jam’ process was both entertaining and informative.

The bizarre themes encouraged everyone to perform experiments they probably wouldn’t have considered otherwise, and ideas and suggestions were bounced around in all directions. Seeing the working methods of seasoned developers outside of the typical development schedule and considerations was also illuminating.

The event was successful enough among the group that future jams are already in the planning stages. Will these sessions shed light on the mysteries of “Mothsps”, “Chicky Wizz” and “chunting”, or will they throw up even more inexplicable things? Either way, it’s sure to be a fun time.

Shortly before Christmas it was announced that Metaplace was closing its doors to the public on January 1st 2010. Metaplace (which I briefly wrote about last year) was the web-based virtual world construction kit masterminded by Raph Koster (of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and Theory of Fun fame), had shown a great deal of promise but had failed to generate enough interest (nor presumably revenue) to justify its continued upkeep.

This is a great shame. Metaplace’s core concept – that appropriately designed virtual worlds could be as frictionless to create and interact with as YouTube videos – is still a compelling one, and one that hopefully will some day be solved.

While I dipped into Metaplace occasionally (attending in-world events and making a couple of small sandbox worlds in an effort to learn the tools), I can’t claim to have put in the time and effort exploring the worlds on offer to give an authoritative account of what the community achieved. While the technology was theoretically capable of representing worlds in a variety of ways (3D, 2D, birdseye, isometric, even plain text), most of the content was geared towards tile-based isometric worlds at around the level of sophistication of Ultima Online. It could perhaps be best described as an update of DikuMUD for the broadband age.

While most of the worlds that users made were fairly small and crude, the breadth of subject matter was impressive. Memorable worlds that I stumbled upon included a recreation of 1880s Whitechapel (populated with Ragnarok Online sprites) intended to teach about the Ripper murders, a virtual hospital, various explorable galleries built by graphic designers and musicians, a Star Trek ship, a transgender memorial garden and (depressingly inevitably) a “pro-traditional marriage” advocacy centre. It was possible to embed YouTube videos, audio streams and web links directly into worlds, making it easy for anyone to populate their worlds with entertaining content. Any world could be linked to any other, making exploration very organic and frequently surprising.

In fact the only things people didn’t seem to be making (at least that I saw) were games or MMORPGs. A project to build a cyberpunk world and role-playing system (MetaPunk) started enthusiastically but soon fizzled. There certainly didn’t seem to be any large-scale community projects of the kind that have been seen in Garry’s Mod for Half-Life 2 or the various modding, homebrew and open source communities.

One possible reason for this was that the unwavering commitment to making Metaplace fully accessible and editable via the web, while noble in intent, drastically narrowed the scope of what was feasible for end users to experience and build.

The sub-50k game client (implemented in Flash) loaded as quickly as a YouTube player, but would then spend a lot of time loading in all the world assets on the fly, resulting in a lot of choppiness. The lack of prediction or any sort of physics ruled out making anything that involved real-time interaction with the world or other users. And tile-based isometric worlds, while cheap in terms of bandwidth, are by their nature very labour-intensive to build, brittle (small changes requiring lots of fiddly rework) and limited in scope for interaction. Faster, 3D, OS-native clients were mooted but never materialised.

The problem was compounded by the editing tools. All aspects of created worlds (including asset management and scripting) had to be carried out through a monolithic Flash application, with a cumbersome and glitchy UI reminiscent of the homespun “windowing” systems used by DOS applications in the days before modern graphical OSes. Every editing operation requiring a round trip to the server slowed the pace of editing to a crawl and quickly sapped my enthusiasm.

What else? It could be argued that there was too much focus on the theory rather than practical applications. Game developers typically build engines with the needs of a specific application in mind. Metaplace conspicuously lacked any major ‘in-house’ project to guide its direction and exploit its strengths.

I expect that such a project would have required far more money and manpower that the company had at its disposal. In which case, the logical solution would have been to recruit the most heavily invested parts of the community to collaborate on building a ‘flagship’ world/network of worlds.

Instead, we got “Metaplace Central”, the virtual world equivalent of a synthesizer demo track – a sprawling, progressively more cluttered lobby area, locked off from user editing and stuffed with gaudy pre-rendered art and rickety minigames. (To be fair, there were themed world-building contest/festivals, but these oddly didn’t place much emphasis on large-scale collaboration, resulting in, for instance, dozens of interpretations of the “cafe” theme.)

Finally, I suspect (perhaps completely unfairly) that the Metaplace user-base was skewed towards virtual world scholars, hardcore multi-MMO/MUD veterans and Second Life, well, freaks. While such a crowd can obviously bring a lot of informed discourse to the table, they are perhaps too willing to overlook the rough edges and foibles of the genre that drive away the mainstream web users and gamers that Metaplace needed to attract.

I suspect that if anyone does succeed at turning user-generated virtual worlds into a mainstream commodity, their approach will be much less pure than Metaplace (maybe even growing from an editor for a specific existing game) and several steps removed from the traditional denizens of the MUD-DEV mailing list.

Machinarium is a point and click adventure game for the PC by Czech independent development studio Amanita Design. I still dimly recall playing Amanita’s debut game Samarost in 2003, and thinking at the time that I’d pay good money for a full-length, commercially released game with the same gameplay style. (Samarost was more of an interactive picture book than a traditional point’n'clicker, having more in common with the Gobliiins! games than those of Lucasarts or Sierra.)

It’s taken them longer than I expected, but then Machinarium is more than just a graphically polished retread of Samarost.

Machinarium tells the story of a small tin robot who seems to be on the bottom rung of a robot society that inhabits a mysterious decaying city. The game opens with the protagonist being unceremoniously dumped (in pieces) in a landfill out in the wilderness, with the immediate task being to find his scattered limbs and get back inside the city walls.

The game has no dialogue, with all relevant plot information being conveyed through the actions of characters, and the occasional ‘thought bubble’ flashback detailing the robot’s past experiences. Without giving too much away, the cause of the robot’s predicament is a plot by a gang of robot ne’er-do-wells (the Black Cap Brotherhood), who have kidnapped his girlfriend (oh god no, what a cliché, how terrible, shut up) and are building a bomb.

Samarost’s mixture of photo collage and microscopic vector animations has been replaced with a spidery, richly-textured hand-drawn art style. (The vector stuff still makes an appearance in the form of water, smoke, cables and other spot effects.) You could make a vague comparison to Beneath a Steel Sky, but a better reference point would be Raymond Briggs’ illustrated story books. I found myself pausing for a couple of minutes in new areas just to take in all the little details. It’s no exaggeration to say that any location in the game would look good framed.

The music (by Tomas Dvorak) completes the “analogue/robotic” atmosphere, incorporating vinyl crackle, radio static, mournful saxophones and incomprehensible vocoder rapping (of all things).

The Samarost influence is apparent in the design of the puzzles. The majority of the puzzles involve figuring out a series of actions in a single screen location. Many inventory items are used in the same location that they’re picked up, and are always discarded once they’ve been used in a puzzle, keeping inventory clutter to a minimum. The game is expertly paced, drip-feeding the player minor victories and new objects to poke at.

The game has some slightly unconventional rules regarding player movement and interaction with the environment that help to regulate the pacing: there are only a few hotspots in each location where the robot can stand (and you can be sure that there’s at least one useful action that can be performed in each one), and the robot can only pick up and interact with things within arms’ reach. Some reviews have been critical of these decisions. I think they work well – they make the player formulate a coherent strategy instead of sweeping the screen for hotspots and dumbly trying to use every inventory item with everything on screen.

You may be thinking that an adventure game with no conversation trees, a smallish game world, and mostly single-screen puzzles can be rattled through quite quickly. To address this, Amanita have incorporated a second type of puzzle in many of the game’s locations. Most of the controls panels, locks and computers in the game feature 2D logic puzzles (of the sort found in puzzle magazines and Christmas crackers) which have to be solved to progress.

The game has a comprehensive hint system that allows the player to cheat their way past these puzzles if they want, but they’re still leant on too heavily. The fact that there are none of these kind of puzzles in the first few screens of the game (used in the demo) suggests that Amanita were aware that they weren’t as much fun as the ‘adventure’ style puzzles.

Trying to dissect Machinarium into a series of puzzles with discrete amounts of gameplay value misses the point. The experience is as much about the response that it provokes from the player. The protagonist, who says nothing and expresses himself with the tiniest of gestures, is more sympathetic than any of Telltale’s characters. You genuinely want him to win out against the Black Cap bullies.

The puzzles have a child-like logic that anticipates how adventure gamers think, and riffs on the simple-minded nature of the robots. Brute force often works, as does silly or physics-bending (but never unguessable) substitution of objects. (Of course some dried out grass and a sheet of toilet paper make a serviceable roll-up cigarette.) On more than one occasion I laughed out loud when I realised what the game wanted me to do (for those who’ve played it, the room with the ‘fan monster’ is a stand-out).

There’s no denying that Machinarium is a short game. The determined player will be able to get through it in a couple of sittings, much like Portal (or Modern Warfare 2′s single player campaign, apparently). While I was disappointed that the game wasn’t longer (I wanted to explore more of the robots’ world), I didn’t feel short-changed.

It’s a ‘coffee table’ game that warrants replaying purely to soak up the atmosphere, and it also includes a great album-length soundtrack (conveniently provided in MP3 format). It would be nice if they managed to port it to the (HD) consoles, as I’d imagine it would work well with a group of onlookers throwing in suggestions.

If I was reviewing Machinarium for a PC mag I’d end with something cheesy like “an adventure game solely populated by robots that has more humanity than any other entry to the genre in the last decade.” Because it’s kind of true.

Kiwitiki is the first game by two-man Canadian indie games studio Dijiko. It’s a platform game with a few unique twists on the formula. There are no enemies or environmental hazards and no time limit. Just a kiwi, a sunkissed tropical island, and hundreds of flowers to collect. The visual style of the game recalls Paper Mario, Yoshi’s Island and Super Monkey Ball, a refreshing change from the greys and browns of most modern PC games.

The controls are also unconventional, using the mouse to simulate analogue movement. This takes a little bit of getting used to but affords much more fluid control of the kiwi’s speed than would have been possible with digital controls.

While it’s fairly easy to muddle through the levels to the exit gate, the real challenge is in achieving the Silver and Gold score ranks, which involves firstly figuring out the optimum route through each level to maximise your combo score. I’m a fairly unspectacular platform game player (I managed to do Luigi’s Purple Coins, but it took me about a hundred attempts), but I reckon that getting the Gold rank on some of the later levels will be challenging for most players.

You can play the game here, as well as on Facebook.

I don’t want this blog to get mired in politics, but this issue is too important for internet users and members of the creative industries in the UK (regardless of their political stripe) to ignore.

The Rt Hon Lord Mandelson wants to give the music and movie industries the power to force UK citizens (and their families) offline on the suspicion of infringing copyright. His plans are unworkable and unlawful, and will do nothing to fix old media’s obsolete business models, while at the same time doing incalculable damage to the UK’s viability as a place to do business online.

You can read more about Mandelson’s (increasingly ludicrous) plans here (Guardian) and here (BoingBoing). Cory Doctorow (yeah, I know) articulates what’s wrong with the proposals here (Guardian).

If you want to stop this unelected meddler from letting his recording industry friends kill the internet in the UK, take action:

Send a message to Mandelson (Open Rights Group)
Sign the petition
Write to your MP
Join the Facebook group (set up by thoroughly good egg Tom Watson MP)

This is not about piracy. (It’s perfectly fine for there to be reasonable, proportionate and legal means for rights holders to protect their work.) It’s about safeguarding access to the internet – something that has already been enshrined as a human right in Finland, France, Estonia and Greece, and which is becoming increasingly necessary to participate in society, be it for work, leisure, commerce, communication or access to public services.

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