Smartbomb

As I’ve previously mentioned, I love Wario Ware DIY. My only complaint is with the highly restricted content sharing tools, but they do include one redeeming feature: a semi-monthly game design contest! I entered regularly to begin with, although as time has passed I’ve spent less time noodling around in Wario Ware and more time concentrating on Game Maker projects – as much as I love working within microgame constraints, there’s not much point making games if nobody can play them. That said, I have had one minor success: one of the games I made last summer was a contest winner!

The contest theme was to make a game inspired by Wario Ware‘s built-in random name generator, and the name I randomly generated was Oh, Samurai! In this post, I’d like to skim over some of the main considerations that went into its design, and in doing so explain some of the principles I work to when designing microgames, most of which is just a concentrated dose of what I consider ‘normal’ design theory.

(NB. This is a terrible screenshot, but it’s the best I can do right now)

To give you a brief description of the game: A samurai is standing on one side of the screen, ready to draw his sword. A crowd of children are randomly moving around in the centre of the screen, each child carrying a balloon. When the player taps on the screen, the samurai instantly dashes to the opposite side of the screen (leaving a little ‘swoosh’ animation where he was standing) and slices a balloon as he goes. The aim of the game is to tap once for each balloon on the screen; taps must be made in rapid succession, and once the player stops tapping the samurai sheaths his sword and all the sliced balloons burst in sequence.

1) Simple controls

Wario DIY‘s only form of player input comes through tapping on the touch screen. There’s no holding, no dragging, no buttons to press, only tapping. The game can identify taps on particular in-game objects, allowing you to create virtual buttons on the touch screen, but I’m very skeptical about this technique. I don’t like the idea of tapping on one object in order to control another – I once made a Klik of the Month game on the subject – and the short timeframe of Wario Ware games means that players just don’t have time to take in complicated controls.

Oh, Samurai! has only one verb – to slice – and it is activated by tapping anywhere on the touch screen. Some players might assume that they need to tap on the samurai; others might assume that they need to tap on the balloons; in any case, the game plays out in exactly the same way. It is intuitive in the sense that it doesn’t care what you do, as long as you do something. Perhaps you could call this ‘interface agnosticism’?

2) Fireworks

In all my microgames, the thing I spend more time on than anything else is rigging up some fun sounds and animations to reward the player for their efforts. By necessity, this kind of feedback needs to be more instantaneous as the length of your game becomes shorter, and 4-second microgames are the razor’s edge! Tapping at a touch screen with a stylus is not very exciting, so it’s important to throw in some flashy special effects – which I would refer to as ‘fireworks’, if anyone bothered to ask me – to let the player know they are actually doing something. Every single meaningful action should make an exciting sound!

In Oh, Samurai! players are rewarded for tapping the screen by a brief animation and a cool ‘slice’ sound effect; they are rewarded for completing a round with a fun balloon-popping sequence; they are rewarded for winning the game with a little victory jingle; most notably, they are rewarded for failure with an animation of the samurai’s trousers falling down. I have mixed feelings about ‘rewarding failure’, but I think throwing in a little visual joke as a consolation prize doesn’t hurt anybody. The reason why this stuff takes me so long is because I usually get bogged down in fine details – such as ensuring that the number of popped balloons matches the number of slices, in this case.

3) Variable requirements

Here’s a more basic point: Games are no fun if you have to input the same routine commands in order to win. I wouldn’t even call that a game. In my opinion the best games incorporate some emotive human element to prevent things from becoming too mechanical, but it’s common practice to just throw in some random numbers instead – it’s usually less technically demanding, and can be applied in a greater range of circumstances.

Oh, Samurai! features exactly this kind of random factor, but it’s really very disappointing. The variation comes in the number of balloons on screen for the player to pop – players must input one tap of the screen for each balloon, without hesitating. Because of the sheer number of animation frames required for the different sprites – particularly the popping balloons – I didn’t have enough memory available to include many children, but at the same time I needed to include a sizable minimum number in order to challenge the player’s counting ability.

In the end I made it so the game has an 80% chance of displaying 5 balloons, and a 20% chance of displaying 4 balloons. This is a very small difference, and it only really starts to become challenging after about a dozen speed-ups. This is probably the worst element of the game.

4) Humour

This one’s entirely subjective, but I like to squeeze jokes into all my games – in fact, I have trouble doing pretty much anything in life with a straight face. Even when I’m making games about suicide and misery, I usually make time for some dark humour. A samurai slicing up kids’ balloons is needlessly mean-spirited but still cute! And if I have to explain why a man’s trousers falling down is funny then there is no helping you.

5) Holistic design

This is a phrase I like to throw around a lot and it’s worth explaining again in this context (before someone convinces me that it’s meaningless). In short, I try to ensure that every element of the game’s design has a relationship to the other elements – that they have a strong ‘purpose’ for being the way they are. It also involves trying to squeeze what you can out of your limitations – in this case, that means working with a limited control system and tight restrictions on the number of objects and animation frames.

Under the terms of the contest, the game name was obviously my starting point for design. I figured Oh, Samurai! would have to be a game about a samurai doing something he shouldn’t be doing, and – yes, drawing lazily on samurai stereotypes such as Goemon Ishikawa XIII (warning: link is an anime music video) – I felt like it would have to involve slicing things up. To keep things simple, one tap of the screen would equal one slice of the sword, and that would be the only control.

I didn’t want any graphic violence, but I did want to include the trope of things only becoming sliced up after the samurai has sheathed his sword. Disappointing children seemed like a good idea – childish, light-hearted, un-samurai-life behaviour – and once I found a good ‘pop!’ sound effect I settled on bursting a collection of balloons. I often use the availability of sound effects to determine the content of my game, rather than the other way around – particularly in Wario DIY, it’s a lot more effective to draw your sprites so that they match your sounds. The number of children, as explained earlier, was determined by a combination of needing to challenge the player ability to count within four seconds, and the animation frame limits hard-coded into the editor. The music was mostly generated by the automatic composer, but the details and instruments were tweaked to make it sound upbeat and vaguely oriental, in keeping with the samurai comedy theme.

Conclusion

All in all I’m pretty happy with how the game turned out, but it’s a shame there isn’t more to be done with distributing the game. I have no idea how many people have played it, there’s no way for them to send me feedback, and after a month or two it was taken off the server and became unavailable again. The only permanent archives of contest winners can be found on fansites such as VixyNyan’s, which require you to use .sav editing tools (like miotool or CrygorTool) to hack the microgame data into your game – far from ideal! If you really want to go down this route and play Oh, Samurai! you can download the .mio file here.

More importantly, I think it exemplifies a lot of the principles I work into all of my microgames, and pretty much all the games I make in general. It’s important to have a clear interface that is rewarding to use – players should be thinking about the effects of their actions, not the act of physical input* – but you also need a substantial depth that holds up once the player has stopped to think about the game.

Basically what I’m saying is that a good game needs to be good in the short-term, and the long-term, and also the medium-term. Don’t all gasp at once!

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*You might want to be a jerk here and talk about games like GIRP and QWOP, but none of these ideas are hard requirements for good game design – they’re simply the things I keep in mind when I am designing.

Heyyyyy! I FINALLY splashed out and bought myself a new laptop, and now I can write stuff while curled up comfortably on my sofa! Hopefully this means my productivity will shoot up, since I no longer have to choose between watching films and working/blogging.

But wait, there’s more! Using its Bluetooth connection and GlovePIE, I can hook it up to Wii and PS3 controllers and use them to play games! This means I can make stuff in Game Maker and then play it on my TV using ‘real’ control pads! THIS IS AWESOME! I don’t dislike PC gaming, but I feel happier with a d-pad and as few buttons as possible.

My dog game is in the final stage of polishing up, but is still some way from being finished. I wanted it finished by the end of March, but now it’s looking more like mid-May. If I’m going to catch up to my ‘one game every three months’ goal, this basically means my next game will need to be completed in a single month! I feel bad about letting the project drift this much, but considering my lack of art/programming training, I’m still quite proud of how it’s turning out. Creating complicated, multi-faceted arty stuff on your own feels pretty great!

In other news, some of the stuff I’ve been writing for DarkZero has started to appear on the site, and we are doggedly maintaining an almost-weekly podcast schedule despite assorted minor chaos in our personal lives. Fake journalism is giving me a lot to think about. I came into it feeling pretty cocky about the quality of my writing, but when I step back and re-read my articles I still find lots of imperfections – usually to do with weird topical jumps, where I’ve edited a group of paragraphs half a dozen times and lost the original narrative flow. I have no formal training in this sort of thing, and I’m becoming more aware of that fact.

More importantly, I’m reassessing my views on the games journalism business. I’ve become even more critical of sites that publish press releases as news, but my cynical view of PR goons is softening. Now that I’ve started to come into direct contact with these people, I’m finding that some them are genuinely likable! I think it’s a point of ‘professional’ integrity that I don’t let my personal relationships influence my writing, but I can see how they would – I already feel a bit awkward about some of the things I’ve published, which is surprising. If I wanted a serious career doing this stuff, I would probably start glossing over negative opinions and not challenging anyone too.

Fortunately I don’t!

I have vowed to release at least one new game every three months this year, and I wanted to upload a playable version of my first project before I go to GDC. It’s a game about playing fetch with a dog in a park. Partly it’s a sort of Artillery style game about throwing the ball, but mostly it’s a rhythm game where you make the dog do simple tricks.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Hold the left mouse button to build power, then release the button to throw the ball towards your mouse cursor.

Once the dog is returning with the ball, left-click to make the dog jump and right-click to make it juggle the ball in the air.

As soon as you land from a jump – or catch the ball – click again to build up your jump or juggle combo.

The game will end after five throws.

Click here to download Dog Game (Beta) (Windows only – sorry!)

The finished game will be released later in the year, with added graphics and sound and ‘narrative’.

On DarkZero podcast #64, we talk a bit about game adverts. My favourites are the old Sega adverts from the early 90′s, and I thought I’d do a quick blog post where I gather some of them up.

The basic premise was that there was this good-looking guy in his late-20′s/early 30′s who lived in an articulated truck with a teenage ninja boy. The guy is apparently training the young lad to be an amazing ninja/gamer, and the training regime involves playing lots of Mega Drive games. All the adverts took place at night, with the guy just hanging out in the back of his truck, playing games in his rotating armchair and casually explaining to viewers how Sega games have made him totally awesome. To begin with, here is the advert that persuaded me – aged 6 – that Sonic the Hedgehog was the coolest game ever made:

Look at him go! Bouncing around in the Spring Yard Zone like a pinball! And the little ninja kid flipping around and bouncing off stuff… it really gave me the impression that I too could learn to flip around and bounce off things like Sonic, if only I had a Mega Drive. Watching it again as an adult, I’m more drawn to background details like the bike hanging up in the back of the truck. The whole interior is decked out in chrome and neon, walled by large banks of mysterious electronic devices and containing a fruit machine, a single large bed (?!), the famous rotating chair, and various pieces of furniture that appear to have been stolen from a funfair.

Who is this man? Why is he hanging out with this ninja kid? The only thing we can sensibly draw out of these ads is that the kid keeps sneaking up on him either as part of his ninja training, or because he wants to play on the Mega Drive, or both. Some light is shed on their relationship by the following advert for Golden Axe:

The music is the real kicker – so laid-back, it come across more like ad for Werther’s Originals than a hack and slash scrolling beat-em-up. Also, it turns out they live with a dog?! We see the guy brandishing an apple while passing another to his young cohort – between that and the bike on his wall, he seems pretty health-conscious! You may also have noticed the brief glimpse of a surf board, in the shot where the kid spins around in the waltzer seat. All in all – putting aside the fact that he’s a loner who plays games all the time and whose only friend is a small child – he’s presented as a character totally outside of normal gamer stereotypes.

I also find it interesting that his words don’t seem to match his actions. “How do you progress to level 8?” he asks. “You eat fast food…” while he eats an apple, “…you humiliate every machine in the arcade…” while he sits at home playing on a console, “…and you practice for real!” as he trips up the ninja kid. Is this supposed to be so ironic? My mind is blown. And on that note:

My favourite of these adverts is the CYBER RAZOR CUT. The guy walks into a barber’s shop and buys a suite of upgrades to his cyborg body, catapulting the internal universe of the adverts into a Gibsonesque cyberpunk future. I remember being slightly disgusted by the ‘body horror’ aspects of the procedure as a child, but also thinking it was totally awesome. These days, I suppose the biggest question on my mind is what kind of society is this guy living in, when a person might walk into a shop and get extensive cybersurgery purely in order to be better at videogames?

I guess after the CYBER RAZOR CUT ad, they decided to spend less time documenting the strange relationship between the guy and his ninja apprentice, and more time showing you clips of games:

Eventually the whole campaign was replaced by the dreadful Sega Pirate TV campaign:

There’s some degree of continuity in that they starred the same actor who played the barber – a man called Steve O’Donnell, better known as The Bloke Who Played Spudgun In Bottom. I hated these ads though, they’re far too fast and noisy and full of ill-conceived ‘subversive’ posturing.

Never mind, hey. Years later, Sega would go on to develop my second favourite ad campaign: SEGATA SANSHIRO!

Dude beats up kids for going outside to play baseball instead of playing on a Saturn.

I’ve previously mentioned some of my views on gender inequalities in games and gaming culture. I thought I’d come back to the topic today, since there’s been a nice convergence of recent events on the subject – I can fill this article with links and make it look like I’ve got my finger on the pulse! The two main incidents on my mind are Penny-Arcade’s ‘Dickwolves‘ saga and this conversation between Destructoid‘s Jim Sterling and The Internet‘s Daphny. Specifically I want to talk about reactions to those incidents, and their place in the broader issue of gender in games culture – if you want to get into a discussion about their specific details, there are plenty of other blog posts and forum threads where you can do that.

Dickwolves

The story began last August when when Penny-Arcade published a strip based on World of Warcraft in which an NPC slave begs a player to rescue him from a life of being raped by “dickwolves”, and the player ignores them because they’ve already rescued enough slaves to complete their current quest. It seems to me that the joke is about RPG mentality, how people ride around performing acts of heroism (or villainy) strictly to quotas set out in their quest log. I think it’s a good concept for a joke, but controversy arose from their choice of ritualised rape as the terrible life that the NPC wants to be rescued from. I would guess that they wanted to make it sound as awful as possible – to highlight the callousness of the player’s attitude – but many people feel that rape should never be brought up in the context of humour and, predictably, a number of readers complained.

So far this sounds like a pretty normal story about an edgy joke that offended some people. The reason why it’s snowballed into an ‘issue’ is Penny-Arcade’s reaction to the controversy. Gabe has said that his response is always “if you don’t like it, don’t read it”, except in this case his actual response was to engage in a campaign of mockery against the complainants. A follow-up strip appeared, in which Gabe and Tycho talked in a patronising manner about how they think rapists are bad people and how they think people should stop raping, which seems to be either missing the point of the initial complaints or (more likely) deliberately trying to make fun of the complainants. When the complaints kept rolling in, they made a t-shirt featuring the word “dickwolves”, seemingly as some kind of badge of ‘anti-censorship’ pride. They’ve also made a few other jokes along the way, but I think selling a t-shirt – capitalising on the back-slapping “lol, people are offended by rape humour” attitude of some of their fans – pretty much capped things off. They have since begun to come to terms with the problem and removed the t-shirt from sale, although even that seems questionable when Gabe still plans on wearing his at PAX.

I really don’t mind the original strip. Aside from anything else, I’d say it clearly makes the player out to be a self-centred jerk – it doesn’t condone rape, or the player’s uncaring attitude. Quite the opposite – it satirises the uncaring attitudes of RPG players to the plight of NPCs, and implicity carries the same message about real-world apathy, which I would think is a pretty positive thing! But I can’t begin to understand why, when people wrote in to say how the joke offended or upset them, Penny-Arcade’s response was to ridicule and attack the complainants. It’s one thing to defend your work, explain the joke, or refuse to apologise, but to publicly roll your eyes and make new jokes at the expense of people who don’t find rape amusing (such as rape victims, the friends and family of rape victims, or any decent human being) is just terrible behaviour. Through their responses, they have started to act like the uncaring jerk who was the butt of the original joke, except they’re doing it in the context of actual, real-life rape. That is why people have become so upset, and that the Penny-Arcade guys apparently haven’t grasped this in the six months since the original strip was published boggles the mind.

Jim Sterling

Last week, David Jaffe made a pretty embarassing remark relating the NGP (or PSP2, as anyone with any sense is calling it) to a vagina. As far as I can tell he was deliberately trying to sound like an idiot in order to get into Edge magazine’s monthly roundup of ridiculous quotes – good man. Meanwhile, on the other side of the internet, a young woman called Daphny laughed at the idea of David Jaffe confusing computer hardware with female genitalia, and began to imagine fictional scenarios in which he has sex with his consoles.

Jaffe later apologised (in a bizarre “if you were offended then I think you are an idiot who deserves to be offended, unless I know you in real life in which case I am truly sorry and didn’t mean it” way). Jim Sterling, reviews editor and apparent firebrand-in-residence at Destructoid, chimed in on Twitter to say that an apology was not necessary. At this point, Daphny tied the incident in with a blog post from 2008 in which Jim Sterling failed to identify a female game character’s mons pubis. She began to imagine fantasy scenarios in which David Jaffe and Jim Sterling might meet up, so that they could fail to identify vaginas together… and then make love (NSFW). Having blogged about this, she then made the questionable decision to Tweet a link to her post to both Jaffe and Sterling.

David Jaffe’s response : “Man if I was still in the vulgar and crude business I’d have some fun stuff to say! Sheesh! Peeps got time on their hands!”

Jim Sterling took a different approach. There followed a lively conversation in which Daphny makes fun of his apparent inability to recognise vaginas, and suggests that he is a closeted homosexual. Sterling, taking this as an insult, began escalate the aggression in his responses until he reaches the following incredible climax:

I’ve been following the fallout from this exchange, and the most common argument in defence of his comments seems to be that he was provoked, or that Daphny was being just as homophobic as he was being sexist. I find it difficult to accept the idea of Daphny as a homophobe, given that she herself is gay, and regularly supports gay pride events, and is all in favour of homosexuality – and many other kinds of sexual activity, as it happens. If she had used words like ‘fag’ then I could understand the argument that she had used homophobic language, but suggesting that a person could be a closeted homosexual in those exact words does not, in itself, sound very homophobic to me. His sexuality is none of her business, of course – I can understand why a person would be upset by someone digging into their private life like that – but it’s hardly an insult. And if he did consider it insulting, then that seems to say more about his attitude to sexuality than hers.

In any case, he responds by identifying her a feminist and then throwing out all kinds of gender-centric abuse – such as calling her a slut, a bitch, and asking “Does your husband know you’re using the computer?” – before attacking her ‘hypocritical faux-feminism’. Evidently he considers himself to be the more feminist participant of the conversation. In the following days people blogged about it, word got around, and he ended up offering varying degrees of apology to some of the more famous people he offended, while also refusing to take back anything he said because she ‘deserved it’. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a person to be upset to learn that some random person on the internet was publishing sketches of them in strange sexual situations. I imagine it can feel pretty violating, and I would probably feel a bit disturbed if it happened to me. I am reminded of that Girls Aloud murder-rape fanfic trial, although it seems to me a lot more obvious that Daphny was being light-hearted. But while it was rude of her to push her blog post in his face, I just can’t believe the kind of language he used in response.

The Point

Both of these incidents have involved prominent figures within the gaming community acting like jerks, and a large crowd of their fans rising up to support their behaviour and attack their detractors. In the first case, a relatively inoffensive comic strip that was broadly sympathetic to rape victims sparked off a disagreement that has led to Penny-Arcade – and many of their fans – mocking people who feel that rape isn’t funny. Maybe you could say that they’re making fun of them for failing to understand the original joke, but if a rape victim told me that they didn’t appreciate the finer points of a joke involving rape, I think I would understand. This – frankly terrifying – page of statistics informs us that around 90% of rape victims are women, and I am confident that most of the people complaining about the strip were similarly gendered. Let’s bear that in mind for a moment.

In Jim Sterling’s case, we see a loudmouth critic (I am referring to Daphny, so that we’re clear) sparking off a flamewar that sees him very quickly pulling out every kind of sexist label imaginable in response. Other members of the gaming community have picked up on this and questioned his behaviour, facing opposition from Sterling’s fans who have come out to defend his right to dismiss people as “feminazi sluts”. The comments under Anna’s blog post on the subject are good examples. Some commentors have accused her and Daphny of trying to engineer the whole controversy, failing to understand that the whole incident was sparked off by David Jaffe’s thoughts on the NGP and Sterling’s touchingly bromantic show of support; others tell her to stop talking about politics and get back to talking about games, as if gender politics aren’t a central theme of every single one of her games; some guys come straight out and say that feminism is a load of rubbish and women should lighten up and get a sense of humour. Women should be able to laugh off being called bitches and sluts, in exactly the same way Jim Sterling couldn’t laugh off a dumb sketch of him covered in dildos.

It seems to me that what we are looking at here are groups of male gamers coming together to defend prominent male community leaders by shouting down women who feel alienated by gaming culture. Sexism is rife in all aspects of gaming culture, whether you look at the demographics of people working in the industry, the characters and scenarios featured in games themselves, or the attitudes of the gaming community. Obviously not every game is sexist or every gamer misogynistic, but the atmosphere ought to be plainly obvious to anyone with any sense of awareness. The secret third thing that’s come to my attention in recent weeks is the existance of Fat, Ugly or Slutty?, a blog of sexist abuse that has spewed from the fingers of gamers. I remember reading an article in The Escapist years ago about how girls don’t exist on the internet which matched up with many of my friends’ stories about life as a female gamer, and it’s kinda depressing to think things haven’t changed much since then, despite the fact that the majority of PC gamers are women.

Sidetrack

Or have things changed? All of these stories are just anecdotal evidence, and as a stat-obsessed economist I can’t say I’m entirely happy with relying on them as a basis for a worldview – I have witnessed some more positive movements against sexism in games, like the ill-fated Female Player’s Alliance, although these have been rare. If you, dear reader, have any stories or evidence of positive developments in gaming culture, I would love it if you’d leave some links in a comment.

The Point, Continued

I think it’s pretty natural for people to be a bit sexist during the earlier stages of their life. The opposite gender is curious and alien and unknown, so it’s not surprising people make strange assumptions about them – boys smell, girls have cooties, etc. I can forgive a lot of sexism among the screeching 13-year-olds playing Call of Duty because they just don’t know any better, and I’d like to believe that most of the quotes on Fat, Ugly or Slutty? come from these ignorant teens. But it’s clear that sexism in gaming culture extends far beyond children, and I think that’s a real problem. Not just in the sense that it makes gaming more exclusive for women, but in the sense that, if those screeching teenage boys are growing up in a culture that supports that kind of behaviour, they won’t grow out of it. Some commentors have said that Daphny and Anna are picking a fight over something trivial, and that if they were REAL feminists then they would be flying around Africa in a helicopter and rescuing oppressed women from tribal violence (or some other ‘worthy’ feminist cause). It really doesn’t wash with me at all. If something is harmful, then I think people should root it out – and if it’s something trivial, they ought to be able to do it quickly.

I doubt that Jim Sterling really is such a terrible misogynist in real life, and I’m sure the Penny-Arcade guys don’t support rape in any way, but I think part of the problem is just to do with our culture of smack-talk. Ever since Bitchmaker-in-Chief John Romero first instructed his co-workers to “SUCK IT DOWN!” while play-testing Doom‘s deathmatch mode, bellowing in your opponents’ faces has been a common element of the game experience. Some people don’t like that, and that’s understandable – part of the reason why Nintendo keep developing such utterly useless online play systems is to benefit these people. For other people, hyper-aggressive screaming is an integral part of their culture – Penny-Arcade themselves have commented on the issue (cf. John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory). Personally, I am totally in favour of smack-talk, although I think there’s a degree of real-world courtesy involved in judging how far to take it.

However, I think part of the reason these two incidents played out the way they did is because gamers tend to carry over that same kind of attitude into their everyday social interactions. Arguing with people on the internet seems to be treated the same way as arguing with an opponent during a game – people say deliberately inflammatory things they don’t mean, and (in a reversal of logic) assume that anyone who criticises is some kind of ‘enemy’. They are not. People on the internet are actually real people (except when they aren’t), and even though many of them still choose to adopt wacky new personas and act like a different person, I think the majority of people these days are just trying to be themselves. If someone approaches you to say that you have upset them, I think the least you should do is try to engage with them and understand why they feel that way – not turn on them for failing to interpret you actions in the same way you do.

Also, I think a lot of male gamers consider sexist language like ‘bitch’ or ‘feminazi slut’ to be an acceptible part of this. They don’t see these terms as being sexist – probably in part because they’re coming from a fairly monosexual culture – so they just throw them around like any other insult whenever an argument kicks off… although in the case of Jim Sterling he seems to recognise that they would offend a ‘feminist’ like Daphny and fires them off in a deliberate attempt to upset her (and fails to realise that they would upset a lot of other women too). I’m not trying to defend this behaviour, I’m just suggesting that it’s a two step process: first they decide they want to shout abuse at you, regardless of your gender, and then secondly they consult their compendium of insults and realise that there’s a whole load of abuse that relate specifically to women. The relative lack of insults relating specifically to men goes unnoticed.

Sexism needs to be addressed, but that’s a universal problem. I think a more specific problem with gamers is that they need to stop being so habitually mean and aggressive! That’s something that applies to pretty much everyone in these stories – that Dickwolfgate has culminated in death threats against Gabe’s family is absolutely insane, and I don’t think it would have killed Daphny to keep her private jokes private. The only person who comes out of all this looking good is David Jaffe, who seems like a cooler guy than his games suggest. On that note, here’s another excellent Tweet from Jim, following a very civil confrontation with well-known female gamer Felicia Day:

“I don’t think I’m fighting with @feliciaday. She’s one of the people I offended who I respect, so I want to try and explain”

How about people stop cherry-picking who they can be bothered to respect?

I bought a PS2 and a stack of games last February, and after two hours playing Metal Gear Solid 3 I decided to put it back in its box until I was on a long holiday. I wanted to be able to sit and play it for whole days, without having to deal with the usual distractions like going to work, putting clothes on, or washing myself. The opportunity finally came at Christmas, when I took two weeks off work to visit my parents. This game is brilliant and was absolutely worth the wait.

Snake Eater is basically two intertwined stories. The main plot is a Cold War story about a CIA agent on a covert mission to prevent a Russian colonel from using a prototype superweapon to stage a coup d’etat and trump the US in the nuclear arms race; along the way he fights a series of bosses with strange weapons and abilities, blows up a giant supertank, confronts the spirits of his victims in the afterlife, climbs a really long ladder and eats his weight in snakes. The sub-plot is basically about a young man growing up and crawling out from under his mother’s wing. On that note, the first six minutes of this video introduces The Boss, who in the space of the week became one of my favourite game characters of all time:

The Boss – not Snake’s mother, but a badass mother figure – gives you lots of helpful advice on jungle warfare and survival techniques during the prologue mission, but then shows up during your escape to kick your ass, throw you off a bridge, kidnap the scientist you were sent to rescue, and defect to the USSR. It puts a strain on your relationship, although she never comes across as being a real threat – at least, it’s clear that she could kill you whenever she felt like it, but she prefers to toss you out of the combat zone and warn you to stay away. The bulk of the game takes place one week later, as Snake returns to the jungle to clean up the mess and put an end to her schemes.

As The Boss says, surviving in the jungle is a lot different to infiltrating buildings. Adapting to these open, organic environments makes the game feel a lot more raw than previous Metal Gear Solid games, but also a lot less rigid. I really struggled to get into Metal Gear Solid 2, and a big part of that was due to the camera controls – in every new building you enter, the radar is unavailable until you download a floorplan from a computer console, so until you find the console you must rely on the fairly static camera angles to scout for patrolling guards and security drones. It’s hard work! Since MGS3 features no radar at all (although some partial radar-like equipment is available – motion detectors, heartbeat sensors, that kind of thing) I was expecting to spend half the game just hiding in tree stumps and looking over my shoulder, but it wasn’t like that at all. At least in the Subsistence version of the game, which comes with a free-floating camera that can be controlled by the right analogue stick, things seemed a lot easier.

Without a radar to monitor guards’ positions, it’s a lot harder to keep track of who is looking in your direction. The payoff is that MGS3 features a camoflage system which means it usually doesn’t matter much where people are looking – with the right concealment, guards won’t notice you even if you’re lying on the ground just a few feet away. Much of my game was spent crawling around in tall grass, where even the most experienced guards would react to me with mere mild curiosity – the five seconds or so it usually takes them to walk over and realise that you are not, in fact, a small shrubbery, gives you ample time to crawl under a rock, shoot them with a tranquiliser or spring to your feet and knock them out with a CQC technique.

More than that, once you’ve played for a few hours and learned a few little tricks, you really start to become one with the jungle. Over the course of the game, it transformed from a hostile environment to an extension of my inventory. It provides food and medical supplies, conceals you from enemies, and contains some surprisingly good weapons – it ALWAYS pays to keep a few live snakes in your bag, since you can use them to scare away guards and clear a difficult path without being seen. Since I was playing through the game without killing anyone, I found these non-lethal natural weapons to be far more useful than the assault rifles I was picking up in store rooms.

I would describe my experience of this game to be a series of boss fights interspersed with stealth puzzles. You usually fight a boss after every five or six sneaking areas, which keeps the action going even on a pacifist playthrough. And while the stealth side of the game was slow and strategic, the boss fights were all pretty amazing.  Mostly you are fighting against the Cobra Unit, a team of freaky super-soldiers led by The Boss, who (apparently) were responsible for winning World War 2… behind the scenes, of course.

The Cobra Unit – Click to englarge
L-R: The Fury, The End, The Boss, The Sorrow, The Fear, The Pain

The Pain is a fat man who can control hornets, and is fought in a cave with a large underground lake – obviously, the trick is to dive under the water to hide from his swarm, and swim around unseen to attack him from behind. The Fear is an agile, lizard-like man with a poisonous crossbow and an invisibility suit, fought in a jungle area full of tripwires and pit traps – his fight mostly revolves around the difficulty of tracking him through the treetops while avoiding the traps on the ground (also there’s a special trick to beating him where you fool him into eating poisonous frogs when he stops to hunt for food during the battle). The Fury’s battle takes place in a pitch-black sewer area, which is gradually transformed into a raging inferno by his flamethrower and jetpack – your aim is to hide in the (shrinking) dark areas while using your nightvision and infra-red goggles to track him as he paces around in search of you. The Sorrow is more of a set-piece than a boss fight… while being tortured, you pass through into the afterlife and must wade through a mangrove swamp while being attacked by the spirits of all the people you’ve killed so far (or not, if you haven’t killed anyone).

The real standout boss from the Cobra Unit is The End, who engages you in a sniper duel deep in the jungle. The fight is spread across three large areas, and is really intense! His camoflage, and the distances at which he will engage you, make him very difficult to see with the naked eye… you must use tools like your infra-red goggles, directional microphone, sonar detector and binoculars to locate him. And while you are peering through your binoculars from behind a tree stump, you are always aware that he is out there somewhere, sweeping his sights across the jungle floor and hunting you like an animal – it’s a shock when the camera suddenly jumps to the view from his sniper scope, with Snake sitting in the crosshairs. Pacifist players have an even harder time in this fight as their only available ranged weapon is their tranquiliser pistol, which means you have to try and sneak up on this expert marksman and attack him at close range. A lot of people think this is a monsterously difficult battle – there are numerous cheats built into the game to make this fight easier, and two ways to avoid it completely – but I really loved it! A real game of cat-and-mouse, putting your camoflage, stealth, hunting and survival skills to the test. I would happily play a game that was based entirely on the gameplay of this fight.

With the exception of The Sorrow, all of the Cobra Unit boss fights seem to share a ‘hunting’ theme – The Pain’s fight involves catching him off-guard while evading his swarm of hornets, defeating The Fear is like fighting off a predator, The Fury must be ambushed from behind, and The End is inteded to be engaged in a long, drawn-out hunting contest. It seems strange to see this same pattern of behaviour (hide, sneak behind and then attack) repeated in so many boss fights, but the different environments and attacks being used mean that each battle feels quite unique. Plus there are other bosses – a few duels against a young Revolver Ocelot, a fist fight against the insidious Colonel Volgin, and the inevitable scene where you face off against his giant tank – but those all feel like part of another game. The one member of the Cobras I haven’t really discussed is The Boss, who rightfully waits for a final showdown at the end of the game:

I loved the fight against The Boss because, for the first time in the game, you feel like you’re fighting an opponent as powerful as you. The final battle takes place in a field of white flowers and you are given ten minutes to defeat her before an airstrike arrives and kills you both, and all the time you are both trying to hunt each other while staying hidden, and using the same kind of CQC techniques to throw each other to the ground and break each other’s bones. It’s clear from the lengthy cutscenes before and after the fight that she doesn’t really want to fight you, and I certainly didn’t want to fight her, but – as she tells you in her introduction at the start of the game – soldiers don’t get to choose their enemies. Even after her defection, she helps you throughout the game – during the torture scene, she helps to spare your life and subtly assists your escape from Volgin’s prison by shooting you in the leg and slipping a fake death pill into the wound. She never seems intent on harming you beyond what is required to prove her loyalty to Volgin.

And yet this is where it ends up. The two of you must fight and one of you must die. Snake must kill The Boss to complete his mission, and she will not go down without a fight. And while all the other Cobras explode after being defeated, she collapses to the ground and demands that you finish her off yourself – that you take responsibility for your actions. There is a moment – 5:30 in that video – where the cut-scene borders disappear and the game waits for the player to press the ‘fire’ button. In the same kind of way that MGS2 is designed to feed you with misinformation until you feel as exploited as Raiden does, I think the intention of MGS3 is to make you so fond of The Boss that it really pains you to kill her, just like Snake. In my case it absolutely worked, again.

Afterwards, it is revealed that her whole defection was planned by the US government as a way to stop Volgin from destabilising the war, and her death at the hands of a US agent was seen as the only way to maintain deniability. Metal Gear canon goes that, about thirty years later, Snake (now known as Big Boss) turns against his masters and starts a war in Africa, trying to establish a country without a government where soldiers aren’t just used as political tools. Clearly, his fight against The Boss is supposed to be the root of that dissatisfaction, and it definitely made me feel a lot more sympathetic to his cause. And the thing is, none of this really has anything to do with the business of tanks and superweapons and the Cold War – for me, all that stuff was just a bit of background flavour, something to do while waiting for the next Cobra to attack. The story of Snake’s relationship with The Boss is much more interesting, and cemented Metal Gear Solid 3‘s status as the best game I’ve played all year. I’m not the kind of sap to start judging games based purely on their stories, but MGS3 is basically an excellent jungle-based stealth game and a series of intense boss fights and an affecting coming-of-age drama, all rolled into one.

People often tell me that the single most common reason why amateur creative projects fail is because they are unrealistically ambitious. Usually they are telling me this in response to some complaint I have about the latest game I’m working on, so it’s not usually something I want to hear, but I’m smart enough not to ignore depressing advice. Around this time last year I was trying to think of ways to expand my portfolio while looking for work, and asked myself: What kind of game would be so simple, so totally idiotproof, that I couldn’t possibly fail to complete it? The logical answer was Pong.

Perhaps I could have come up with an easier game, but Pong is also extremely elegant – perfectly balanced in strategic terms, and a good mix of reaction and prediction. If you need convincing, I’d suggest you read the theory of Pongism. There was no doubt in my mind that I could knock together a working version in Game Maker, but obviously there was little value in making an exact copy. What kind of changes could I make that would notably change the gameplay without losing its elegance? I thought about games like Llamatron and Galaxian, before realising that it probably wasn’t going to help much. I didn’t want to add or remove anything, just change the way the game was played, and I realised the key to that was to change the timing of the game. It followed that the simplest way to change its timing was to make it turn-based – to split the game into a ‘movement’ phase where the ball is locked but the paddles can move, and an ‘action’ phase where the paddles are locked and the ball can move.

Then I got a new job and suddenly the portfolio stuff didn’t seem so important and the idea was shelved. Here is another valuable lesson in why creative projects don’t get finished.

Over the last year I’ve been regularly taking part in Klik of the Month Klub, a 2-hour game-making contest fought using the most awkward and unusuable tools it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. This month I decided to kick it up a notch and enter Ludum Dare. I thought it might be a fun way to start my Christmas holiday! Well, right from the start I was disappointed when ‘discovery’ was chosen to be the theme of the contest – considering how popular Minecraft has become since the summer, I was expecting a lot of the games to follow similar themes of digging and spelunking. In a more general sense, every adventure game ever involves discovering strange new locations, characters and artifacts. I wanted to something a bit more unusal, more like the kind of weird junk I turn out for Klik of the Month Klub, so I thought about ways to turn the theme around and make it more interesting.

Instead of being about the act of discovery, my game would be about the fear of being discovered! You are hiding something from someone you care about and you will jump through hoops to prevent them learning your terrible secret. Perhaps you are a serial killer who has invited his friends round for a dinner party, but has carelessly left a load of corpses and murderous implements lying around the house? I decided this was too morbid – like with my experiments with Wario Ware DIY, I think I prefer making games that are broadly family-friendly. How about this: You are a gay teenager and you are trying to hide this fact from your family! It was an interesting idea, and if the subject matter was handled well it could have ended up as a really good game.

But then I remembered the old advice about not being over-ambitious. I scaled my ideas back, thought things over, scaled them back, thought things over, and eventually ended up thinking about my idea for turn-based Pong again. It was perfect! Hide the ball and make it a game of deception, where players use radar sweeps and other tools to bring together partial scraps of information about the ball’s location, deploy decoy balls and counter-intelligence to keep their opponent in the dark, and all in the midst of a regular, back-and-forth game of Pong.

Well. I realised early on the second day that there was no chance of me finishing the game in time to enter Ludum Dare, but I did have time to comfortably complete my original turn-based Pong idea. Instead of trying to fudge in the counter-intelligence effects, I focused on just polishing up the game I had – adding some little messages and visual effects, fixing the one little niggly bug I found regarding deflection angles, etc. I think it came out alright! The bats are a bit too small perhaps, and I think I should compile another version that runs at a smaller resolution – currently it’s running in 1280×720 – but I’m happy with it. It came out pretty much exactly how I expected. The only disappointing element is the name – I couldn’t decide what to call it, and I wasn’t sure if mentioning Pong in the title could lead to legal issues.

Download Generic Turn-Based Video Tennis Game HERE (Windows only).

“The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it.”

So said Epicurus, and in doing so he summarised much of the appeal of traditional videogames. What is the point of playing a game like God of War? You jog down a linear path, solving clearly signposted puzzles and killing waves of repetitive enemies until the story reaches its predictable conclusion. God of War even goes so far as to bend over and moon you with its inevitability, by starting near the end of the story and framing the gameplay as a flashback – a narrative device that was highly praised by critics when Prince of Persia did it two years earlier. The reason why God of War remains an enjoyable play experience isn’t the writing, but the fact that you get to crush giant monsters into a bloody pulp.

It is a game of visual spectacle, of sweeping vistas and impossible architecture, gory pyrotechnics and attention-seeking sexuality. Every stage of Kratos’ marathon run is seamlessly connected, cutting out loading screens and making anyone with a natural sense of direction feel quite dizzy. After leaving an ocean port at the start of chapter two, you can run through the centre of Athens and emerge halfway up a cliff; following the cliff to the left leads you to a large underground sewer (halfway up a stone mountain?) while taking the path to the right leads to a barren desert (a short walk away from the ocean and mountain range and a bustling metropolis???) The geography of the game world is every bit as stark, twisted and impossible as the mythological monsters you are there to exterminate, all of which is intended to make viewers gasp with awe. In my case, I’d say it worked.

Puzzles are typically environmental and rarely challenging; most fall in the “push the statue onto the tile” category, which come with a bar set high by games like A Link to the Past. The more interesting ones involved the unnatural properties of mythological beasts and artefacts, like using a severed gorgon head to petrify enemies on top of pressure switches (so, er, more statue-pushing, essentially) but these are unfortunately rare.

The real meat of the game lies in its combat, a repetitive square-dance where you dodge and block and dodge and block until your enemies are in a certain position or perform their ‘ludicrously open to attack’ animation, and then you mash your favourite combo until they recover and repeat the cycle. Every enemy has a behavioural achillies heel – the only one that isn’t immediately obvious being the wraiths, whose weakness I only discovered by reading the manual – and most of the combat boils down to bringing these tactics together in different ways, depending on your environment and the particular combination of enemies you are fighting. Enemies become stronger and tougher during the course of the game, which is represented visually by a change in skin colouration.

I hope I’m not the only person reminded of Golden Axe at this point.

The real breakout feature of God of War‘s combat is the QTE minigame execution system. Most of the larger enemies drop into a ‘vulnerable’ state when their health is sufficiently low – perhaps dropping to one knee and appearing to nurse a headache – which tells the player that they are ripe for a violent death. Buttons are tapped in sequence, analogue sticks are rotated, eyes are plucked out and heads are twisted free. Again, these lend to the spectacle of the game more than the combat – it feels a little disjointed, like being flipped between Ninja Gaiden and Wario Ware. That aside, it does make the combat a lot more interesting to look at, and provides brief pauses in which to catch your breath. I particularly liked how executing certain enemies provides certain bonuses (minotaurs restore health, gorgons restore magic power, etc), which adds another tactical layer to combat – deciding the order in which to kill your enemies, in order to make the most of their execution bonii.

The action really comes to a head in its colossal boss encounters, such as the hydra at the end of the prologue stage. These stunningly violent showcase battles tend to follow standard patterns of dodging and counterattacking, mixed with QTE scenes where Kratos will shoot his opponent in the heart with a ballista, or impale one of their heads on a broken mast. This is one area where the game feels lacking – many stages end with a simple, protracted brawl against waves of standard enemies, and you feel like you’ve been cheated out of a boss. I massively underused my special attacks and magic powers during these fights, because I always expected a raging demigod to show up afterwards and end the stage with a bang.

I’d also like to highlight the final boss battle as being particularly badly designed. He’s extremely powerful – which is fine, for a final boss – but what makes the fight unfair is that in the preceding cutscene you are stripped of all your weapons and handed a new sword, which comes with a whole new set of attacks that you have no experience with. The whole control system seems to change during the final fight, with no warning and no opportunity to practice! I had to stop and ask GameFAQs for advice, which rather ruined the experience.

God of War is a pretty good game, it’s just not very inspiring. The combat is challenging through repetitive, but mainly I found the visual design to be interesting enough to keep me ploughing through. If you like pushing buttons on a joypad to make a virtual representation of a man attack virtual representations of mythical creatures and mechanically reduce their health stat below the threshold required to trigger their death animation, then you will love this.

Final Fantasy X-2 is the most unusual Square RPG I’ve played since Live A Live. It includes many traditional Final Fantasy game elements but changes their gameplay functions, resulting in a weird subversion of the typical FF formula. It still has an unintelligable story, random battles and a cast of moody teenagers, but playing the game is a strange experience.

The party is stripped right down to three characters – bubbly thief Rikku, skeptical swordfighter Paine, and wistful heroine Yuna. All three girls are available from the start of the game, following an opening sequence that resembles a James Bond title sequence set to a JPop soundtrack. All three girls can train in any job that the player has collected (although, disappointingly, outside of the battle the game always shows them in their ‘official’ job outfits, shown above).

With such a small group, you get a very strong feeling for how the girls relate to each other. Rikku and Yuna are old friends from their FFX days, and they spend a lot of time talking about their former associates. Paine is the outsider of the group, but she’s comfortable with that – she’s focused on the job, and has no interest in discussing her personal life, or her past. Rikku is quite happy-go-lucky and often tries to persuade Yuna to live dangerously and act like a hero, while Paine is objective and pragmatic, always turning conversations back to the mission at hand. Most of the emotional development in the game is therefore provided by Yuna, who often finds herself caught between her two friends.

FFX told the story of Yuna’s early life as the High Summoner, a sort of Dalai Lama figure who was expected to save the world from total destruction. The game charted her pilgrimage across the world of Spira, from her seaside village on Besaid Island to the ancient ruined city of Zanarkand – if you look at a map of the game world, you can probably see that the game is geographically quite linear. Her whole life was laid out in front of her – almost literally, in a straight line.

In FFX-2 Yuna has already saved the world, escaped the life of the High Summoner, and is now a young woman who is free to choose her own destiny. Her life has become a lot less certain, and it shows in the way that everyone she meets expects different things from her. When monsters attack, the people of Spira expect the High Summoner to drop out of the sky and save them; When treasure is detected, her captain expects her to go forth and steal it; When a concert promoter loses workers and equipment in a bandit raid, Yuna is asked to do everything from selling tickets to performing as the headline act.

But what does Yuna want? As she comes to terms with her newfound independence, she spends much of the game pondering this question – particularly with regard to her relationship with Tidus, the now-dead protagonist of FFX. Cutscenes throughout the game are narrated by Yuna’s internal monologue as she has one-sided conversations with her dead lover:

“So many things seem intertwined. But nothing leads to you. Why be a sphere hunter if what I’m hunting for can never be found?”

Listening to her private thoughts makes you feel like you’re peeking into her diary – it contributes to the game’s sense of intimacy. She loves Tidus… loved Tidus… but should she hold on to her feelings and continue to search for him, or get over her loss and move on? Her predicament is mirrored in that of the game’s antagonist, a hunky young Blitzball player called Shuyin who, as it happens, died 1,000 years ago. Shuyin and his lover Lenne have a lot in common with Tidus and Yuna, not least their physical appearances. They were killed together at the height of a great war, but Shuyin’s spirit refused to pass on to the afterlife without Lenne – his ghost has spent a millennium wallowing in rage and sorrow, and has now returned to exact his revenge by destroying the world.

Shuyin clearly represents the dangers that Yuna faces if she continues to cling to the past, refusing to accept that Tidus is dead. If there is an antithetical character in the game, it is probably Wakka – Yuna’s childhood friend, who during the course of the game comes to terms with his brother’s death and vows to be a good father to his newborn son. It shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that the ‘good’ ending of FFX-2 involves Yuna saying goodbye to Tidus’ ghost and looking ahead to a future without him.

The problem I have is that there’s a special ‘perfect’ ending where Tidus is brought back from the dead and they are reunited. I know I’m being a real killjoy here, but this magical fairytale romance ending really put me off! After 40 hours following a story that is all about letting go of the past and moving on with your life, your ultimate reward is to have that message swept out the window. Sometimes, if you want it badly enough, dead people can come back to life! You can turn back the clock on your relationship and start over! It’s shameful fanservice fluff that undermines the entire game in my opinion.

That aside, I enjoyed it. I did have issues with some of the FF traditions they failed to cut – level grinding, occasional bosses with ludicrously unfair abilities, secret equipment that reduces the game to trivial effort – but there’s a lot of stuff I really loved. The side-quests are a lot of fun, and all have their own special briefing and debriefing scenes that go beyond the usual conversation-in-a-pub that normally take place. The girls are a likeable bunch, and the supporting cast are just the right amount of quirky (the weakest characters seem to be the NPC hangers-on from FFX, who only seem to exist in order to wrap up their loose ends from the previous game).

The thing that I’m realling coming away from this game with is that it feels very feminine. Not just because of the all-female cast, but the way all of the stories are about negotiation, making actual decisions, and changing relationships – not just ploughing through a linear course of action and imposing your will onto the world. Plus it spends a lot more time than most games talking openly about feelings and relationships and stuff, mostly from Yuna’s point of view but also from characters like Lulu (the mother of Wakka’s child, who wonders what kind of father he will turn out to be) and Dona (a former summoner who has fallen out with her repressed admirer Barthello). In FFX-2, Square-Enix have done a good job of portraying female perspectives without falling back on dumb stereotypes (much).

Wario Ware DIY, to give it its full name, is great! It lets you create games in a manner similar to Game Maker: draw some sprites, combine sprites with simple logic to create objects, throw in some music, set up your win/lose conditions and you’re done. The tools are about as simplified as they can be without providing a prefab library (and in some ways it even does that, since you can import assets from the ‘official’ microgames).

Currently I’m putting out three or four new microgames a week, usually while stretched out in front of the TV. Some of my ‘projects’ have taken a few days to complete – I tend to spend a long time fiddling with sprites, so animation can take a long time – but generally I can go from having an idea to shipping the game to my friends in about 90 minutes. And even that feels like quite a long time, under the circumstances.

I think anyone who is at all interested in game design or production should play this game! One of the most repeated comments about the Wario Ware Inc. series is that it dismantles the gameplay sequences of normal games (eg. jump on the koopa troopa and then dodge a fireball and then collect the coins) and spits them out as individual gameplay events (eg. GAME 1: Jump on a koopa troopa, GAME 2: Dodge a fireball, GAME 3: Collect the coins). Wario DIY basically does the same thing with regard to game design! Instead of thinking about the big picture (which I think most people tend to do), it grabs you by the collar and forces you to focus on these individual moments of gameplay and screams in your ear “IS THIS FUN?!”

Unfortunately I think this game is going to vanish from public awareness pretty quickly, and will probably end up as a sort of insider club for dedicated enthusiasts. There are two things wrong with Wario DIY.

First: FRIEND CODES! These have been the biggest speed bump on Nintendo’s online service ever since they were first implemented. It’s not too difficult to register a set of codes, but it is a pain to have unique codes for EVERY SINGLE GAME, but the real reason they screw up Wario DIY is that they SEVERELY restrict the sharing of games. Other content-sharing games (eg. Little Big Planet) have online databases that anyone can access, giving every player access to millions of man-hours worth of content. I would LOVE to be able to browse through all the random junk that other players are making, but because of Nintendo’s child-friendly online policy I can only share games with a couple of my friends. It’s so patronising to treat adult customers like fragile little children!

Second: Nintendo barely seem to be advertising the game! I only became aware of its existance after reading dessgeega’s blog post about it. Part of me thinks that they could even want to sweep it under the rug a little, since it’s such a ‘game for gamers’ – it certainly doesn’t fit into their “IF YOU LIKE PROFESSOR LAYTON THEN YOU’LL LOVE THE LEGEND OF ZELDA” advertising nonsense¹. Poking around, it turns out they talked about it at E3 last year… now I’ve seen the video, I do have vague memories of getting excited about it with my friends, but in the 11 months between then and the release date I haven’t heard a peep.

I can’t very easily show off any of the games I’ve made on here (although I have seen ‘microgame management’ tools that can be used to edit roms of Wario DIY and hence trade microgames via PC), but one other thing I would like to mention is adult content.

I design my games according to a few simple principles. I’ll write more about it later someday, but basically I start with a gameplay hook, keep the graphics simple, and then throw in some special effects whenever the player does anything. My natural inclination is to keep everything family-friendly, because there’s enough sex and violence in games already. I think it’s an interesting design exercise to look at the games you are playing, identify the violent content (eg. jumping on a koopa troopa, dodging a fireball, possibly even collecting coins if you consider it forceful misappropriation) and then think of ways the gameplay could be recontextualised to remove the violence (eg. jumping on a trampoline, dodging a wedding bouquet, collecting litter… although even these could probably be construed as violent if you thought about it long enough – why are you dodging a bouquet? Will you be FORCED to get married if you catch it?).

Anyway, a few days ago I decided to throw all that out the window and try making a game that was needlessly violent and shocking. Big game companies do it all the time, so I think it was a justifiable experiment. In my game, the player is presented with a close-up view of a woman’s exposed chest, and must tap on her breasts to create a series of cuts around her nipples. When each breast has a full circle of cuts, the game is won and the player is given a ‘reward’ animation in which a hand sweeps across the screen and removes the nipples, leaving a bloody mess. EDGY!

Now that I’ve finished the game and sent it out to a select group of my friends, I have to say the whole experience has left me feeling a bit depressed. I’ve read a few reports about how some Rockstar employees felt really uncomfortable about making Manhunt, and I can sympathise with them (although obviously my game is on a totally different scale). I deliberately pushed myself to make a game about sexual violence against women because it’s pretty much the last thing I would normally want to do, and I’ve learned that… I should trust my instincts!

This kind of thing is a good example of why Wario DIY is great. It’s amazing how much insight into game design you can get from these squiggly little four-second microgames. I just wish they’d open it up to the public, so it could spark off a global ‘conversation’ about gameplay, and give people some hands-on experience of how and why games are made.

Oh, and in case you’re thinking “Clearly they need friend codes to prevent children from stumbling upon sick filth like your breast-slicing game!”, I’d like to add that it’s because of the restricted content sharing that I felt ‘safe’ to publish the game. I wouldn’t have released it it if I thought it would be widely available (which is still a possibility I suppose, in the unlikely event that it goes viral).

……

¹ Seriously, compare these UK adverts for Ocarina of Time and Spirit Tracks. It’s good that they’ve progressed from denigrating female players to putting them on screen, but why pretend that it’s a casual game? Why do they never show her fighting monsters?! It’s like they still can’t admit that girls enjoy ‘hardcore’ games too. And it totally misrepresents the game, which is bad advertising in my opinion.