The Ludologist

Wired has the spectacular story of the thoroughly failed Gizmondo game system and the very shady Bo Stefan Eriksson: How a former Swedish debt collector and criminal managed to lure amazing amounts of money from investors in order to launch a doomed portable game device.

This is the story: Dubious character realizes that there are lots of money to me made in video games, invites equally dubious and video game ignorant friends along to make it big, launches terrible games.

I can’t be the only one to think that this is also the story of WarioWare, with Eriksson playing the role of Wario (or vice versa). Life imitates art. (Or vice versa.)

The difference being, of course, that the WarioWare games are sufficiently bad to be really, really good.

Seems we have an “unbelievable implementations of Pac-Man” week, so here is … Pac-Man in an Excel spreadsheet.

Research answering a seldomly posed question: What happens if you let real insects control the ghosts in a game of Pac-Man?

This: Animal Controlled Computer Games: Playing Pac-Man against Real Crickets.

My feeling is that game balancing could be improved by selective breeding of the crickets, which I hope Wim van Eck will have time for in a future project.

I am fortunate enough to be in New York for the very exciting Come out and Play festival of street games, so will be spending much of the weekend running around Manhattan.

I will also be participating in a panel with Frank Lantz, Jane McGonigal, Jesper Juul, Roy Kozlovsky, Franz Aliquo, and Nick Fortugno (this is sitting down, I presume) at 7PM on Saturday @ Eyebeam, “What are street/big/pervasive games anyway?“.

Understatement: The game ranking for Bomberman Zero is 33%.

The reviewers more or less agree that Bomberman Zero removes all the good parts from the series:

• Top-down view.
• The characters
• Dying instantly when being hit
• Multiplayer on one console/screen.

While adding new unwelcome features:

• New “futuristic” characters.
• First person view (most of the time).
• Health bar.
• 99-level single player with no continue option.

Compare this to, say, New Super Mario Bros (89%), which has managed to take an existing series and genuinely update it (it is absolutely great).

My take is that it is about how you deal with technology and game style changes:

• Bomberman Zero seems to follow the ca. 1999 laundry list of “new cool things”: First person view, vague futurism with murky textures, online multiplayer and follow that slavishly. (Single player without continue is more 1986 than 2006 though, retro in the bad way.)
• New Super Mario Bros sticks with the 2D format (retro in the good way), but mostly builds on advances in character animation tools and game physics: The game feels modern due to the great animations and the exquisite physics – it is all about a sense of bodily presence in the game. Modernized, but not by way of a laundry list, and without destroying the game’s core.

There you have it: This is how to make a modern version of an old game. Ok, so it is not that simple. New Super Mario Bros is probably easier to modernize because a slightly open game of exploration and travel is quite contemporary, whereas single-screen 2d action games are hardly made anymore.

Still, I could imagine a 2D top-down Bomberman modernized like New Super Mario Bros: Better animations, better physics. I would play that.