Games developers are illusionists. Convincing players to mentally conjure places, people and stories out of rudimentary arrangements of switches and blinking lights demands something more than just engineering skill. As hardware has grown ever more powerful and sophisticated, the need for creative sleight-of-hand has not diminished.

That whizzy new console may provide a leap in processing and effects over its predecessors, but the novelty quickly palls leaving developers searching for increasingly cunning techniques to make this year’s blockbuster outperform last year’s while constrained to the same hardware.

One of the deepest and nerdiest pleasures of the games enthusiast is discovering how the trick works. I can reel off some personal favourites from games I’m most familiar with, but to get a truly diverse view I plundered the collective RLLMUK Forum memory-banks in this thread. Read on for ten of the most celebrated examples of gaming smoke and mirrors (with YouTube links where applicable).

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Things which can be appropriately described as a “nation”:

• The Universal Zulu Nation
• The Nation of Islam
• The Sioux Nation
• Belgium

Things which cannot:

• People who like certain American sports which EA holds exclusive rights to, severely limiting their ability to choose games based on quality, or in extreme cases, basic fitness for purpose.

Referring to such as the “EA Sports Nation” might come across as rather presumptuous, don’t you think?

(More substantial new content is on its way. Check back soon…)

The three console manufacturers have made their annual addresses to US retail laying out their wares and plans for the rest of the year. The general consensus seems to be that this was very much business as usual, with no earth-shattering announcements.

Microsoft reeled off an impressive array of third party content, all of which will also be available on the PC and/or the PS3, with no new announcements. Their first-party efforts were largely focused on playing catch-up with the Wii (this month’s NPD figures are expected to show the Wii overtaking the 360 in the US, and without a significant price cut announced that gap is only going to widen), with increasingly-tired Scene It and Viva Pinata retreads being joined by a Singstar clone (Lips) and a technically simplistic Eyetoy-style game (You’re In The Movies). A protracted and awkward on-stage demo of the latter revealed it to be a video version of Mad Libs, which output very rough looking chromakey’d skits that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Kenny Everett Television Show.

Their big reveal was that Final Fantasy XIII will be coming to the Xbox 360, which is perhaps inevitable considering the series’ popularity in the US. Tellingly the 360 version is not slated for a Japanese release. Square Enix also showed a raft of other RPGs (one of which was openly stated as being PC-bound), demonstrating that Microsoft’s strategy for the Xbox 360 in Japan is to continue plodding down the Mistwalker route, providing isolated games that appeal to genre fans without building a software ecosystem around them that would justify a more general audience buying the machine.

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I don’t want to make a habit out of making fun of people on this site, but this week Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg (who we saw defending the insane pricing of the Xbox 360 HDD a while back), is coming out with stuff that’s too good to ignore:

“I think that there’s a difference in the type of customer that is buying the Wii. When you think about it, there’s a difference between trying to be the number one console with nine year old gamers, and being the console that offers the most experiences from 13 to 33…

You see they’re not buying games on it, right? They’re buying it, it’s like something they break out when people come over, and it’s maybe a fun thing, but it’s almost like the same people that buy a karaoke machine, you know? They’re not really buying it for games, they’re just buying it as a novelty.”

In other words: “Nintendo is for kids! Local multiplayer games are not real games! Fun is sooo immature!” Embarrassing, playground-level arguments, and particularly poorly timed considering that Super Smash Brothers Brawl currently sits at the top of the all-formats European chart, hot on the heels of the mega-success of Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii.

It will be interesting to see whether Nintendo make public any of the data from their Nintendo Channel survey system, because I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people buying Brawl aren’t “nine-year-olds”, they’re the same audience that bought into the previous installments of the series, and who overlap heavily with the crowd who bought GoldenEye 007, Halo and Grand Theft Auto IV. The audience we’re led to believe is in thrall of the Xbox 360.

To be fair to Greenberg, while at this point it’s clear that the Wii isn’t a fad or a novelty, it still remains to be seen whether the Wii userbase will maintain or increase the rate at which they buy games for the system. Having said that, it’s far from established that the Xbox 360 is driving huge software sales either. Take the PS3 and PC sales of recent blockbuster titles out of the equation, and zoom out from North America, and the story looks very different.

It appears that this isn’t the first time that Greenberg has gotten a little emotive and vented his frustration. (I’d quote from that but virtually every sentence is FUD. Rounding on the PS3 because not every game is 1080p? Please.)

Peter Moore had the right idea (your correspondent double-takes and peers at his drink suspiciously): if an interviewer asks you a tough question about a competitor, offer them guarded praise (”God bless ‘em”) and try to steer the conversation to safer ground. Don’t blurt out a load of FUD that flies in the face of the sales figures. The days of consumers buying into one games platform and shunning all others are over. You can focus on bringing something positive to that mix or you can alienate your customers. Your choice.

Man, I totally did not get on with these stupid things at all.

Pixelblocks are like a bunch of tiny one-stud legos that you can link together to make mosaics and shit. They say on the box that they’re a construction toy - yeah, like the Nintendo Wii is a games console (AMIRITE?). You can’t make the kind of cool spaceships and robots and stuff you can with legos, instead the point is that they let you recreate characters out of games. They don’t say this on the box anywhere because I guess that wouldn’t look very educational, and these things cost serious buck$$$ so they probably want to sell them to parents as well as developers and dorks.

I ordered the largest set they make (please note I did not go into a toy shop to buy these, toy shops are totally for babies), which includes 2000 pieces. Initially my plan was to build a Locust Abdominator, a new boss enemy from Gears of War 2 which rips out people’s ribcages with a giant vending machine claw. However with a bit of preliminary mental math I figured out that I had barely enough pieces to render one of the creature’s groinspikes. Jeez!

I was going to send a wicked harsh email to Pixelblocks LLC, but then some of the guys here explained that the idea was to make sprites from old retro games, from the caveman days before normal mapping and petulant occlusion stencils. I dimly remembered that Epic had done some 2D games before Unreal, Jazz Jackrabbit and Jill of the Jungle or something, but when I brought this up with the guys they pretended not to hear me. So all I could think of to do was Mario or Zelda or some other kiddy Nintendo shit.

All the technical brainsteins in the audience will have probably figured out that 2000 pieces does not exactly equate to true HD resolutions. It is in fact 0.002 megapixels, which is even worse than an iPhone camera I think. The colour depth is kind of limited as well - it could be charitably described as 12-bit colour I guess because you get bits in twelve different colours.

But what really blows is the fill rate. We are talking minutes per line here people. An Etch-a-Sketch could run rings around these things. I don’t see how anyone could do anything useful with this system ever.

I can’t help but think that I could have better spent the two hours that it took me to build Mario flipping the bird. I could have been designing an even gnarlier set of out-sized armoured shoulder pads for one of our ethnic stereotype space marines.

I wouldn’t recommend these at all as they’re totally not moving with the times. Next time I want something to decorate my cubicle I will follow the art department’s advice and buy a bunch of figurines from Spawn.com. I hear that they are coming out with a series of ‘dark’ reimaginings of Hanna Barbera characters this year. Their diorama of zombie Snagglepuss disemboweling Huckleberry Hound in fetish gear would look totally sweet on the shelf above my desk. Totally. Sweet.

Peace out dudes!
- DeThSkEwEr -

Erm, yes. Pixelblocks are quite a fun and versatile toy, but there’s a grain of truth in Brad’s criticism of how long it takes to build things with them. They are also rather expensive, although random tat emporia like TK Maxx sometimes have them on special offer. On the positive side, the end results look very impressive even without special lighting or presentation, and unlike mosaic beads they’re endlessly reconfigurable if you get bored of your current creations.

Flickr documents some of the slightly more imaginative uses they’ve been put to, such as both Sam and Max, various other characters, and this ridiculous effort (along with endless versions of Mario, Link and Megaman, of course).

I suppose they’re also quite a good tool for teaching the challenge of maximising what you can achieve with limited resources, although thankfully game developers typically don’t have a limited quota of black and white pixels at their disposal. Maybe that’s an opportunity for micropayments that EA should look into.

This piece was originally published here in April 2004. Puyo Puyo is my favourite of the many falling-block puzzle variants. Puyo Puyo 2 on the Mega Drive (now available on the Wii Virtual Console) is probably the version that best balances presentation and functionality, but Fever is a respectable entry to the series, and it was ported to a staggering number of platforms. (It’s really, really bloody twee though.)

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I should forewarn you that this post is going to contain marketing speak, and stuff that is probably only of interest to people who follow the business side of mobile games. I’ll get back to talking about less deathly dull subjects in the next update.

On mobile games industry news sites (like Pocket Gamer and Mobile Entertainment), I’ve seen a steady trickle of positive news stories about a company called Greystripe. Greystripe’s business model is to license mobile games from publishers and ‘wrap’ them with dynamically updated advertising. Users can then download the games for free from Greystripe’s GameJump website (and elsewhere), and are shown some full-screen ads each time they enter or exit the game.

On the face of it, this sounds like a system that’s beneficial for all parties: customers get free games, publishers get a steady revenue stream, and advertisers get good data on how many people are seeing their ads. Certainly, the magic words “mobile advertising” (currently as effective for hooking venture capitalists as “mobile search”, “mobile video” and “free birdseed” have been in the recent past) have ensured that GreyStripe’s coffers have been generously filled by investors.

However, there are significant issues with such a model of which mobile games publishers should be wary. (Please note that I’m referring to ad-funded games in general here rather than singling out Greystripe specifically. There are other companies trying similar models which may also be affected these problems.)

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Continuing the trawl through my old games writing, here’s a look at Treasure’s 2005 remake of their breakthrough hit Gunstar Heroes. My opinion of the game hasn’t really changed, it’s a technically strong but otherwise unremarkable romp. At the time of course we didn’t realise that Gunstar and games like it would represent the peak of Game Boy Advance development (the official line from Nintendo was that the DS was going to be a “third pillar”, before its massive success effectively made the GBA obsolete).

I remember being terribly annoyed by John Walker’s 5/10 review of the game for Eurogamer at the time. It’s still an unfair review (the “less than one hour long” criticism is meaningless - the original game was of similar length, and many other console action games follow the arcade model of offering infinite replayability rather than hundreds of similar levels), but Treasure’s later efforts have been received more favourably.

The following piece was originally published here in December 2005.

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I’ve read a number of interesting articles recently, some of which cover topics which I was going to explore in more depth, effectively saving me the effort.

First up, Tadhg Kelly reacts to the news from Microsoft that the Xbox Live Arcade service is to start de-listing games based on low review scores and conversion rates. I agree that this is an idiotic decision, which fails to address problems built into the system’s interface and which could over time lead to a ‘brain drain’ as publishers focus their efforts on increasingly attractive channels elsewhere (WiiWare, PSN, Steam, Gametap, etc.).

GI.biz’s Rob Fahey writes about Nintendo Europe’s continual stock shortages. I moaned about Mario Kart Wii being out of stock everywhere the other week - now it appears that Wii Fit has bombed out of the charts simply because NoE can’t get enough stock.

Fahey cites previous products which have run afoul of these issues, including Wii Play (which disappeared for months, only to return a few months ago in massive quantities, which retailers were able to sell at a premium, in the light of the ridiculous prices the game/controller bundle had commanded on eBay in the interim), as well as the Wii console itself. I’d add Gamecube Resident Evil 4 to that list (which Nintendo published in Europe, and underestimated demand for by a vast margin). If Nintendo even tried to take Europe seriously, heads would have rolled a long time ago at NoE.

By way of balance, here’s a rather long and self-congratulatory article by Sean Malstrom which draws a distinction between Nintendo’s strategy under Iwata and what the wider industry has labelled ‘casual games’ - it’s not about dumbing down, but rather carefully encouraging consumers to try more complex things. The excessive length aside, Malstrom makes a convincing argument, and I would hope to see more third parties take these views on board when planning future Wii releases.

The most interesting place to be right now is in games that offer an extra layer of depth and engagement, to give the players who bought Wii Sports, Wii Play (and in many cases Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games) a bunk up to the next tier. (The phenomenon of games being needlessly cut down and simplified could be applied to LostWinds, but it’s by no means the worst offender.)

Finally, something from the obscenely talented and witty Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw about gaming webcomics (which I’m jiggered if I can find a way to link to directly, but this should find it - UPDATE: Yahtzee has now filmed this for ZP - it’s utterly glorious). I’ve avoided talking about or even linking to any gaming webcomics on this site because they all fail as comics and have nothing to do with games. I genuinely believe that they’re making games worse by spoon-feeding dubious opinions to thousands of impressionable kids who don’t have the attention spans to read something without pictures, gratuitous uses of the word ‘fuck’ and constant pandering to a sense of fraternity with their fellow ‘gamers’. Ctrl+Alt+Del is by far the worst offender on all counts.

(And really finally, Bill Harris’s Friday Links serves up another bumper helping of fascinating “Believe it or Not!”-esque content sent in by readers. A regular feature that I heartily endorse subscribing to.)

The Neo Geo Pocket Color (NGPC to it’s friends) was SNK’s attempt to revitalise the handheld market in the early 1990s, having recognised that Nintendo’s decade-long dominance of the sector had led to stagnation, and that there was an untapped audience for a more technically advanced system with games that appealed to players who wanted something more than just Pokemon and bad movie licenses. You could (if so inclined) draw parallels between the machine’s short but creatively fertile life and that of the Sega Dreamcast.

Often erroneously described as having been a commercial failure (or having been beaten in the marketplace by Nintendo), the NGPC was in actuality a modest success, thanks to the low price of the hardware, strong marketing and the availability of some recognised franchises (such as Pac-Man, Sonic and Puzzle Bobble). Unfortunately this was too little, too late for SNK.

SNK’s collapse was brought about by serious company-wide issues. The closure of the NGPC business was a result of these issues rather than a significant contributor towards them.

The years that followed the death of the NGPC have seen extremely rapid technological advance in the handheld market (driven by the mass-market adoption of mobile phones) and huge success for new generations of handheld consoles (the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and to a lesser extent the PSP). As a result, NGPC games look and sound a little shabby these days, but the ingenuity, attention to detail and responsive controls that were their hallmarks can still be appreciated.

The machine’s best games included Card Fighters Clash, SNK vs. Capcom The Match of the Millennium, Faselei!, Neo Turf Masters and Sonic Pocket Adventure, all of which are well worth playing (and worth my covering in more detail in future updates). However, the first game I’m going to look at was a lot stranger than any of those. Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun was a virtual pet game and minigame collection that prefigured the WarioWare games, and invites the player to re-examine their definition of what constitutes a ‘game’.

(The following was originally published in March 2003)

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