Category: games

I haven’t been following the Rubik’s cube scene too closely the past few decades, but it’s doing well according to news.com:

On Saturday, at the International Rubik’s Cube competition held at the Exploratorium here, Lo took just 11.13 seconds to set the world record for solving of one of the iconic red, white, blue, green, yellow and red cubes.

For updates, check speedcubing.com.

Not that “world records” for the Rubik’s Cube are that important – a lot of luck involved in the way a cube is scrambled. I admire the focus that people bring to the thing, I never thought about being so systematic about it. Old puzzles never die.

A favorite obsession is to ponder the differences between Western and Japanese game tastes. Hardcore gaming 101 has published shots of how the boxes of various Western games look in Japan.

I’ll just link straight to Deus Ex: Invisible War, American and Japanese covers:

So this would support the idea that the Japanese are more spiritual & sophisticated. But if you check out the Backyard Wrestling cover, it looks a bit different. Not that Backyard Wrestling is the epitome of taste and sophistication, but still.

(Via Ars Technica.)

News.com on board games becoming faster:

“What we call ‘time compression’ is becoming an overbearing trend in our industry,” said Richard Tait, co-founder of board game company Cranium.

With kids’ schedules packed with afterschool activities and homework, and the rise in both dual-income and single-parent families, Tait said it is hard for families to find time to play board games–especially new ones they haven’t played before.

“In today’s world, if there’s a new entertainment experience, it’s got to be quick to learn and quick to play,” he said.

Sounds a bit like conventional wisdom for video game design. Though I think changes in video game design (from difficult and long to easy and short) is also a reflection of the industry trying to talk to non-hardcore players.

NEW YORK? Electronic-entertainment giant Take-Two Interactive, parent company of Grand Theft Auto series creator Rockstar Games, released Stacker Tuesday, a first-person vertical-crate-arranger guaranteed not to influence young people’s behavior in any way.

“With Stacker, the player interacts with an environment full of boxes?lightweight, uniformly brown boxes with rounded corners?and uses diligence and repetitive hard work to complete his mission,” said Doug Benzies, Stacker’s chief developer. “We’re confident that the new ‘reluctantly interactive’ content engine we designed will prevent any excitement or emotional involvement, inappropriate or otherwise, on the part of the player.”

From The Onion, brilliant as ever.

With the launch of the Xbox 360, the idea of the Uncanny Valley is becoming a popular meme.

Clive Thompson writes in Wired:

My hat is off to whoever designed the new King Kong game for the Xbox 360, because they’ve crafted a genuinely horrific monster. When it first lurched out of the mysterious tropical cave and fixed its cadaverous eyes on me, I could barely look at the monstrosity.

I’m speaking, of course, of Naomi Watts.

Not the actual Naomi Watts. She’s heart-stoppingly lovely. No, I’m talking about the version of Naomi Watts that you encounter inside the game.

In some ways, her avatar is an admirably good replica, with the requisite long blond hair and juicy voice-acting from Watts herself. But the problem begins when you look at her face — and the Corpse Bride stares back. The skin on virtual Naomi is oddly slack, as if it weren’t quite connected to the musculature beneath; when she speaks, her lips move with a Frankensteinian stiffness. And those eyes! My god, they’re like two portholes into a soulless howling electric universe. “Great,” I complained to my wife. “I finally get to hang out with a gorgeous starlet — and she’s dead.”

James Surowiecki discusses the 360 in Slate:

The closer a game gets to resembling the real world, the ways in which it’s different become more obvious, and the more psychologically jarring those differences become. Flaws that in earlier-generation games could be written off as the inevitable product of technological limitations now seem glaring and inordinately frustrating. Sometimes these are small things. Why, in Call of Duty 2, do your fellow soldiers keep running in front of you as you’re drawing a bead on an enemy? Why can’t two people walk through a door without getting stuck in an Alphonse-and-Gaston routine? Why can I jump over that wall but not this fence? And sometimes the flaws are bigger: Why doesn’t this story make more sense? Would a person actually do this?

I think that developers have to take a step back. The blind aim for “photo realism” simply doesn’t work. Think animation, think cartoons instead. Players don’t care about polygons.

From the When 2.0 event, News. com has a video clip of Will Wright discussing games, time, and phase spaces.

The clip makes me want to see the beginning and end of the talk, but interesting nevertheless.

It’s is pretty clear that Will Wright thinks very much in terms of systems (high SQ), the surprising part is that he was able to pull off a very human-centered, emotional game like the Sims.

Lately I’ve been working with Diginet and IGDA Denmark to set up a game jam in Copenhagen.

So I am happy to tell you that Nordic Game Jam 2006 will run January 27th-29th 2006 at the IT University of Copenhagen.

The basic format is that you can sign up as a team or individually, and that between Friday and Sunday you have to make a game prototype on the theme of collaborative multiplayer. Games are then demonstrated on Sunday afternoon with panel and participant judging.

Compared to the Indie Game Jam, this game jam is focused more on group work, and is also technologically agnostic, encouraging people to work with whatever tools they prefer.

The event is for game developers, students, researchers, and everyone in between. Around 40 participants in all.

Read more and sign up here.

If you haven’t played Rag Doll Kung Fu, you really should.

Not that it’s the greatest game ever made, and the controls (dragging the rag doll character around) can be infuriating. Yet it has some strong things going for it: a unique lo-fi aesthetic with deliberately unconvincing cut-scenes, and low-budget but super-cool 2d graphics. And it’s being distributed online via Steam for $15.

Gamasutra has an interview with Mark Healey, the Rag Doll Kung Fu developer. (Registration required.)

GS: So we’re talking a zero budget for the cut scenes?

MH: Yeah, basically. We ended up spending about fifty pounds for some plastic swords and headbands. We borrowed a video camera and just improvised. It was just a couple a friends who decided to make a stupid kung-fu film. There was never any plan. It’s amazing it came out as well as it did.

I think the big news is that Rag Doll Kung Fu really hits the sweet spot as an indie game: It was developed on a small budget, it is cheap, and at the same time it has a specific feel, a lo-fi aesthetic that you can not get from big budget titles. This is the kind of indie game we have been waiting for for a long time.