General gaming |
- Spirit Camera Brings Entertaining Daytime Horror to the 3DS
- How Saints Row: The Third Nearly Failed
- Harvest Moon Creator Yasuhiro Wada on His Game's Cross-Gender Appeal
- OP-ED: Blizzard's Latest Attempt to Lure Back WoW Subscribers Reeks of Desperation
- Super Mario 3D Land: Game Design Before Fan Service
- A Quick Look Back at Heavy Rain in the Shadow of Kara
- The Stanley Parable is a Crowning Achievement in Metafiction
- Crazy Facts We Just Learned About Portal 2
| Spirit Camera Brings Entertaining Daytime Horror to the 3DS Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:15 PM PST Yesterday, I got my first hands on time with Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir, an augmented reality horror game from the makers of Fatal Frame that uses the 3DS as a "Camera Obscura" -- a possessed camera that players use to take photographs and interact with Spirit Camera's ghastly world. Through a combination of AR and the Gyro Sensor technology, players get transported to and from a spooky mansion as they attempt to piece together the larger mystery taking place. My demo begins with the arrival of package that includes the Camera Obscura and a small notebook called the Book of Faces -- in the real world, the Book of Faces included with Spirit Camera is actually a small pamphlet, but hopefully you get the idea. The prologue identifies the Book of Faces as a mysterious and haunted object, and one whose appearance usually leads to strange happenings and disturbing events. As much as that sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon -- and I wouldn't blame you for thinking that to some degree -- that vibe contributes to why I'm so interested in Spirit Camera. Sure, the premise is a bit silly, but a horror title where invisible things appear and disappear through a special viewfinder is still entertaining. |
| How Saints Row: The Third Nearly Failed Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:11 PM PST "Visual and quality issues were the number one complaint in Saints Row 2," said Design Director Scott Phillips at a Saints Row: The Third postmortem at GDC on Thursday. Despite the retail performance of the second game, he explained that developer Volition couldn't take success for granted. Producing a goofy breakout hit didn't automatically give them the resources or insight to improve upon the game. Phillips documented how the team created a better and more cohesive experience by improving upon the last title's tone, quality, and scope. "How you're going to say something can be more important than what you're saying," explained Phillips. Nothing could be more important for a game like Saints Row: The Third than setting the proper tone. He felt that the previous two games in the series suffered from incongruous emotional moments falling too close together -- SR2 tasked you with committing a brutal murder in cold-blood after an extended "vehicle surfing" moment. He stated that the team on the first Saints Row "wanted to make...an MTV music video," but that clashed with some of the goofier missions. |
| Harvest Moon Creator Yasuhiro Wada on His Game's Cross-Gender Appeal Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:08 PM PST Take a look at the list of retro game post-mortems at GDC 2012, and Harvest Moon may seem out-of-place; after all, there's no question that Gauntlet and Fallout changed the industry, but a niche farming sim? On the surface, at least, Harvest Moon doesn't seem as relevant as the other old games being dissected this year, but this late Super NES release actually laid the groundwork for outrageously popular titles like The Sims and Animal Crossing by showing the world that day-to-day drudgery could make for a highly addictive experience. Original developer Yasuhiro Wada (now of Toybox) and Natsume Vice President of Operations Graham Markay sat down with me after the panel to discuss how such an atypical concept has been able to thrive over these past 16 years. Harvest Moon owes a great deal of its success to cross-gender appeal; women make up nearly a third of the game's Japanese audience, a percentage doubled by its American user base. But, initially, Wada never intended for Harvest Moon to strictly appeal to women; later in the series' history, the "for girls" releases would feature the same essential experience as the games with male protagonists. And further down the line, male and female protagonists could be selected from the very start, allowing players to decide on their gender of choice without having to buy an entirely different game. |
| OP-ED: Blizzard's Latest Attempt to Lure Back WoW Subscribers Reeks of Desperation Posted: 08 Mar 2012 03:00 PM PST The latest attempt by Blizzard to regain former World of Warcraft subscribers comes in the form of the Scroll of Resurrection. To the company's credit it's a hell of an incentive to get back to playing what is still the world's most popular subscription-based MMO, but I can't help but wonder if it comes across as so desperate that it will make it harder to keep players coming back in the future without the help of another promotion. Last year's big ploy, which continues to this day, was to offer the game for free up to level 20, a scheme I think is smart for WoW and other, non-F2P MMOs. (Blizzard also offered a free digital copy of Diablo III to anyone willing to commit to a year of WoW.) The newly-announced Scroll of Resurrection is geared towards bringing back former subscribers rather than trying to attract new ones. |
| Super Mario 3D Land: Game Design Before Fan Service Posted: 08 Mar 2012 02:28 PM PST After feeling little soured on Super Mario 3D Land, I've gradually come around to enjoying the game more for what it is. Certainly hearing director Koichi Hayashida's musings on the thinking behind 3D Land's design has been illuminating. He delivered an interesting presentation yesterday at Game Developers Conference 2012 which outlined the development process, then met with me this morning for a more in-depth interview. The point that Hayashida kept circling around was that the game, being a "reset" of the 3D Mario series (as he calls it), was built with playability and functionality in mind first and foremost. This means that familiar elements of the past, like Super Mario Bros. 3's Tanooki Suit, were added later as the team began fleshing out the game's details. He's quick to clarify that the original plan for Mario 3D Land was not simply to borrow ideas from 1990's NES classic. "There are simply a lot of fans of Mario 3 on the team," Hayashida said. "It's the game everyone seems to love most. |
| A Quick Look Back at Heavy Rain in the Shadow of Kara Posted: 08 Mar 2012 12:29 PM PST Just before David Cage's Game Developers Conference presentation yesterday -- at the exact moment Apple announced its new iPad, in fact -- the Heavy Rain director was stuck in a meeting room doing press appointments. A few hours later, he would entertain the Internet with a tech demo called "Kara" showing a robotic girl convince herself that she is human (seen above). Much like Quantic Dream's "The Casting" tech demo released prior to Heavy Rain, the team designed Kara as a glimpse into the technology they are experimenting with rather than as a hint to the content of their next game. So during my appointment with Cage, I clarified a few points on the video -- the virtual actress Kara won't appear in the team's next game like Mary Smith from The Casting did in Heavy Rain, Sony funded Kara, and Cage's team is working exclusively with Sony at the moment. But since he couldn't say much more than that, I figured I'd use our limited time to sneak in a handful of questions about Heavy Rain in retrospect. |
| The Stanley Parable is a Crowning Achievement in Metafiction Posted: 08 Mar 2012 11:42 AM PST I've always been fascinated with breaking the fourth wall in art. Whether it's a moment in Arrested Development when Ron Howard directly addresses the audience or the opening of Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which begins with the passage, "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler," metafiction has always appealed to me as a puzzle where solving and experiencing become synonymous. While Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series has always been held as one of the pillars of self-aware video games, a 2011 Source mod may very well be the definitive work in interactive metafiction. The Stanley Parable begins with a narrator introducing you to Stanley, a mild-mannered office drone who spends a great deal of time pressing buttons...much like the player who is currently controlling Stanley. The entire mod takes place within the confines of a seemingly banal office space adorned with olive green shag carpet and stale air. After stumbling upon the realization that he is the only person in the facility, you guide Stanley into the next room. The player is given their first dose of meta-narration within the first 10 seconds of the game. Upon entering a room containing a pair of doors, the narrator tells you that, "When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left." But seeing as how you are in control of Stanley, you can choose to have him obey the narrator and go left, or disobey the omniscient voice and head right. That's when things get tricky. |
| Crazy Facts We Just Learned About Portal 2 Posted: 08 Mar 2012 11:10 AM PST Even if it's not strictly related to my topic, I couldn't resist going to "Creating a Sequel to a Game That Doesn't Need One" panel for Portal 2. Valve writers Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, in the space of 40 minutes, detailed some of the craziness and creativity in creating a sequel that would be more compared to Grand Theft Auto III rather than Titanic 2. The talk alternated between sage advice ("if you're going to do a comedy game, make it co-op") and amusing quips ("so in the end, we finished and released the game, and there was one clear winner for most game of the year awards: Skyrim"), but below are the biggest takeaways from their talk: |
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