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.

Fallout 3 looked visually weak from the little that was shown, seeming little advanced from 2005’s Oblivion (and much greyer). The introduction of a turn-based combat option seems needless, and it remains to be seen if Bethesda can put together a more story-heavy RPG as opposed to another dungeon bash in the Diablo/Dark Alliance mould.

Resident Evil 5 (which also showed up in Sony’s show) impressed as expected. The number of elements being brought over from Resident Evil 4 (such as reskin/clones of Doc Salvador and Ramon Salazar) is getting a bit ridiculous, but that gets no complaint from me. A cooperative mode was announced, which will hopefully include something similar to the cabin siege in RE4. High def footage is here and is astounding.

Fable 2 annoys me, irrationally. I’ve not followed the game closely, but what was shown strongly suggested to me that Lionhead are suffering the problem that has been dogging them since Black & White, and that could be leveled at several other veteran developers: they’re trying to second guess an audience that they’re not part of any more. I suspect that there is a cultural disconnect with their American overseers at Microsoft Game Studios, similar to the issues that Just Add Monsters faced when making Kung Fu Chaos.

Fable 2 doesn’t seem to be a game with its own voice, rather an unappealing mixture of fashionable elements that they think Microsoft will like (a dog, like Nintendogs, a child that grows to be a hero, like Ocarina of Time, reams of customisation and minigames cribbed from Animal Crossing and The Sims) and forced attempts at quirky ‘British’ humour (bird shit, amateurish voice overs, burping wife). The demonstration assumed that we’d automatically want to spend a long time in this sandpit, fiddling with secondary and tertiary embellishments for hours on end. I can’t help but think that if I did want to do that, I’d choose another game which didn’t have such a profoundly unappealing art style, and perhaps implemented one kind of gameplay fully instead of half-baked versions of a dozen different genres.

Gears of War 2 cleaved to the formula of the flawed but commercially fortunate (”Kids! Need something to shoot at while you wait for Halo 3?”) original. A solid but technically unambitious game aimed at people that unironically whoop in crowds. The various multiplayer modes that have been discussed (including a 5P vs. AI siege mode, and a mode where the if the team leader is killed, the team loses the ability to respawn) sound intriguing, and will hopefully be implemented in other online games in future. I’m vastly more interested in what Id are doing with Rage, but then I’m an Id fanboy.

An overhaul of the 360 system software was revealed. I had previously predicted that towards the end of the machine’s life, it would receive a software update replacing the interface with one geared towards acting as a media hub and downloading content (as opposed to the current focus on discs). The announced changes go beyond my prediction, introducing a party system and the ability to install disc-based games to the HDD. It also introduces an ugly and derivative avatar system (which according to David Gosen is an improvement on Nintendo’s Miis because the characters have limbs - ?!) which will inevitably be used as a vehicle for more microtransactions. Coupled with the shift to larged HDDs, the new dashboard gives MS a solid foundation to encourage more users to regularly download games and video.

Most of the rest of the presentation was paying lip service to consumers outside of the 360’s target demographic. With the possible exception of Banjo Kazooie, the games shown in this family segment were a pretty miserable bunch (the aforementioned Singstar, Buzz and Eyetoy clones).

With no price cut and no new ideas, Microsoft seem to be treading water. Nothing suggested that wheeling out the likes of Scene It and Viva Pinata yet again would be any more successful than earlier attempts.

While Microsoft railed King Louie-like at the constraints of their demographic, Nintendo had a different problem. With the Wii and DS now way out in front, Nintendo seem to have slackened the pace of software development. There was little new to see, and much of it was aimed at the extended audience. Oddly, Nintendo chose to show very few third party titles, focusing on those that supported Wii peripherals such as the balance board and zapper.

Animal Crossing City Folk for the Wii seemed to be virtually identical to the DS and GC versions, with networking capabilities still seemingly being approached with a great deal of trepidation by Nintendo. In spite of this the underlying game is strong enough to warrant repurchasing, and the introduction of voice communications should improve the multiplayer mode over the DS’s fiddly text input. Perhaps it will be possible to transfer DS content to the Wii version?

Wii Sports Resort was used as the showcase for the new Wii Motion Plus gyroscope peripheral. Sword fighting and jet ski racing (basically Wave Race) demonstrated the capabilities of the device and looked like they might have some replay value. Hopefully there will be some additional events of similar complexity on offer, rather than throwaway ones like the Dog Frisbee game that was also shown. The game will probably be a default purchase for most Wii owners regardless, and hopefully will give the Motion Plus add-on enough momentum to gain third party support.

The only third party Wii title of any note shown was Call of Duty World at War, which appeared to at least be making an effort visually (unlike the PS2 and PSP ports the Wii is still occasionally lumbered with), with some slick flame effects. Hopefully this and the exclusive Shaun White snowboarding game mark the start of a trend for third parties making a decent fist of Wii development.

The big news for the DS was the announcement of an all-new GTA game for the system. Worryingly, most of the third party games for the DS were described as being ‘custom’ games, suggesting that most of the Western third parties still aren’t viewing the DS as an important platform, but rather as somewhere to offload lazy cutdown cash-ins on existing brands, a soulless Spore variant (which might as well be called Spore Universe Brand Extension Content for 8-13 Demographic) being a case in point.

The big finale (assuming that was what it was supposed to be) was Wii Music. This looked (and sounded) very dubious, offering dozens of instruments that could very simplistically be ‘played’ and seemingly dispensing with the skill element common to most successful rhythm games all together. It seemed that we were supposed to be convinced by Miyamoto’s endorsement of the game alone. Maybe there’s an audience for music games that aren’t being catered for by Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but it’s certainly not a strong enough proposition to justify the way it was presented here.

While the Nintendo presentation failed to deliver anything particularly exciting, it was interesting to see the disproportionately negative response that it provoked from gamers. The exclusive focus on the extended audience was interpreted as a slight by some particularly stroppy individuals.

The strange thing is that the most strident of these critics admit that they are better served by the other consoles and the PC, and in many cases don’t even own a Wii. Why they need another console to offer the exact same sort of thing isn’t clear. In the 16-bit era, when it became obvious that the SNES was the primary destination for JRPGS, JRPG fans bought SNESes. They didn’t petition Sega, they just got on with gawping at FFVI and Chrono Trigger.

What is really motivating this behaviour is fear. These identity conscious ‘hardcore’ gamers have seen how well the Wii is selling and are terrified of it becoming a de facto standard in the PS2 mould. I don’t think that this is really an issue that is going to come to a head any time soon. Between the PC, PS3 and 360 there is a large enough audience for games beyond the technical scope of the Wii.

Thankfully Nintendo didn’t resort to pandering to the most tiresome and nostalgia-blinded contingent of their fanbase by digging up the mouldering corpses of Punch-Out or Kid Icarus, as had been widely rumoured before the show. I’m sure that Retro Studios and Nintendo’s internal teams are working on some more appealing ‘traditional’ games, but with no new announcements at the show, the Wii’s schedule looks a bit barren for the rest of 2008.

After the two preceding damp squibs, all eyes were on Sony to offer something (anything) surprising. While Sony may have finally gotten the PS3 back on track, with HD-DVD buried and PS3 versions of multiformat releases steadily taking a larger slice of the pie, all the games they had to show today were either affected by preview fatigue (having been dangled in front of audiences for a year or more already), or too early in development to show actual footage. The theme of the presentation in fact seemed to be ‘wait and see’, pointing out that the landmark games in the psOne and PS2’s lifecycles mainly showed up in the third year or beyond.

Resistance 2 was demonstrated at length. A gameplay sequence mixed technically ambitious effects (a building-sized slavering monster, and more subtle elements like the lighting and post-processing effects) with rather clunky indoor sections and scripted events. A cinematic trailer put the game in a better light, showing more of the outstanding mechanical design teased in earlier screenshots, and ending with a spectacular shot of Chimera ships looming over a city.

Instantaneously, naysayers claimed that the game was not as pretty as Gears of War 2, blithely ignoring the extreme difference in scope of what Resistance 2 is technically trying to do. Gears of War 2 is still a corridor-based single player game with small-scale deathmatch-oriented multiplayer. It practically has to have baroque normal-mapped details plastered all over every surface to give the GPU something to do.

LittleBigPlanet was inventively used to present the obligatory package of conference chartzengrafs. A nice demonstration of the game/tool’s versatility, and perhaps an acknowledgement that there’s not really much more that can be said about the game itself that hasn’t been covered in previous demonstrations.

The PS2 was given a bit of stage time. Surprisingly, there is still some relatively big-budget development going on, with Mercenaries 2, Yakuza 2 and some new EA Sports games being shown. (The presence of EA Sports games on PS2 was surprising, and makes a still greater mockery of Peter Moore’s public griping about the performance of their games on the PC and Wii. The PS2 merits full-scale, deep sports simulations but the Wii doesn’t?)

An extremely diverse range of PSN games were then quickly run through (nothing that would get me reaching for my credit card, but all nicely polished). Playstation Home was wheeled out again. I was initially cautiously optimistic about Home, but with each delay it seems less of a great leap forward and more like a high concept project that has spiralled perillously off schedule and over budget.

A great deal of stage time was then spent on listing off a raft of complex and expensive PSP games which nobody will buy. It must be getting to the point where it would make more sense for Sony to bite the bullet and reposition the machine as a networked media player. (The PSP version of Valkyria Chronicles was news to me, and hopefully bodes well for a Wii port in future.)

Finally we returned to the PS3 for a set of teasers of games slated for 2009 and beyond. DC Universe was, of all the games shown this week, the one most inevitably destined to sink without trace. An MMO based around the DC Comics characters (and strangely seeming to allow the players to play as them - not sure how this is going to work), DCU was talked up by a DC Comics employee who seemed to think that the audience would be enthused by the stream of cryptic comic-nerd gibberish that he was spouting, rather than sitting in awkward, pitying silence.

Sony were on safer ground with a teaser of God of War 3. Sadly no gameplay footage was shown. Neither was their any footage of the final game to be announced, MAG (Massive Action Game), pitched as a large-scale (256 player) persistent squad-based war game from Zipper Interactive (the SOCOM developers). The modern combat setting will probably help to bolster player numbers, but it remains to be seen if this is going to be a spiritual successor to Planetside, or just a bigger, even more chaotic version of Battlefield. A PC version would be nice.

Oh, they also showed a new trailer for inFAMOUS, which I had literally not thought about since it’s last conference showing. A trailer was shown which appeared to be gameplay footage, and distanced the game from Crackdown both in terms of content and visual fidelity. Presumably we now won’t see any more about the game until it’s in the shops.

So in summary, RAGE, Resident Evil 5, Animal Crossing City Folk and Little Big Planet all look exciting. But we knew this already. Same time next year then.

“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.)

Title: Puyo Pop Fever (Japanese title: Puyo Puyo Fever)
Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: Sega
Date Published: February 4, 2004 (Japan), February 27, 2004 (Europe), June 2004 (North America)
Platform(s): Sega Dreamcast, Sony Playstation 2, Nintendo Gamecube, Microsoft Xbox, Arcade, Apple Macintosh, Windows PC, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP
ESRB/PEGI Rating: E/3+
No. Players: 1-2

Puyo Pop Fever is Sega’s first attempt at bringing the popular Puyo Puyo puzzle franchise to the current generation of home consoles (if we don’t include the Dreamcast in the ‘current generation’). Since Sonic Team inherited the franchise from its creators (Compile) a few years back, each incarnation of the game that they have developed has displayed progressively more of their individual style. Puyo Pop Fever attempts to reinvigorate the franchise by introducing an entirely new art style and characters, as well as some (relatively minor) gameplay innovations.

Puyo Pop Fever’s protagonist is a ditzy apprentice magician called Amitie. Amitie attends a magician’s school (note the Harry Potter influence) and wants to become ‘a wonderfully clever magic user’ (note the amusingly stilted translation from Japanese). To this end she challenges everyone she meets (schoolmates, teachers and various unsavoury characters) to play Puyo Pop. Amitie’s chief rival is the snobbish Raffine (a playable character on the harder single player courses), and her teacher is the dreamy (as in, seemingly on Valium) Ms. Accord, who is compelled to deliver around half of her lines through a cat hand puppet for reasons unknown.

For the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with Puyo Puyo, the gameplay involves dropping pairs of small jelly blobs with eyes (Puyo) into a pit, with the intent of joining together chains of four or more blobs of the same colour, which then disappear. As with Columns, gravity makes the remaining Puyo fall to take the place of their vanquished brethren. This can lead to chain reactions of disappearing Puyo. The game is fundamentally competitive, with the player always playing against an (either human or CPU) opponent. When one player successfully makes a chain, Ojama (colourless nuisance Puyo) are dropped into the opponent’s pit. Increasingly elaborate chain reactions act as ’spells’ that cause increasingly large numbers of Ojama to fall. However the other player can create chains to counter these attacks. The first player to fill their pit loses.

Puyo Pop Fever introduces some variations to the classic Puyo Puyo game rules. Groups of three or four Puyo occasionally drop (the ‘four’ piece taking the form of a large 2×2 square puyo of one colour, whose colour can be changed with the ‘rotate’ button). The biggest change is the inclusion of Fever Mode. This is a special mode which is activated when a player fills their Fever meter by making consecutive chains. In Fever Mode the player is taken to a seperate game pit which is primed with Puyo arranged to set off a lengthy chain reaction. The player has a few seconds to place a Puyo to trigger the reaction. If they succeed this causes a massive attack to the enemy player, otherwise the Fever Mode pit is cleared and the player is presented with another arrangement of Puyo. This process is repeated until the player runs out of Fever time. Success of failure in this mode can turn the tables on the other player, and lead to a long, fraught battle of wits and reflexes.

By now it should be apparent that this is essentially the same game that we’ve known and loved in all its previous outings. In terms of presentation however it is a radical departure. Puyo Pop Fever is excessively cute. Admittedly, Puyo Puyo, with its bizarre, superdeformed RPG characters was fairly cute, but Fever turns it up to eleven. The characters are drawn in a brightly-coloured comic book style that brings to mind the Powerpuff Girls and Junko Mizuno illustrations.

The largely static cutscenes are accompanied by saccharine American voice acting. Amitie spouts insufferable valley girl slang (”Get really real!”), and the other characters are all given distinctive personalities by what seems to be a small but highly versatile voice team. Some of these are quite amusing. The skeleton character (a long-time Puyo stalwart) has been reinvented as an outrageously fruity fashionista (”Call the fashion police!”). An onion-headed character can only say the word “Onion!” with various inflections (similarly, a frog can only say “Ribbit!”). At one point the original Puyo heroine (Arle) makes an appearance, with a voice that seems to be a parody of her Engrish exclamations in the original games (”Fiyyya! Ice-u Storm! Gu-gu-guh!”).

Puyo Pop Fever’s twee music, large-print cutscenes and general atmosphere of kiddiness will probably be too irritating and embarrassing for some Tom Clancy-weened male gamers. I found them pretty much tolerable and in keeping with the theme of the game, and I don’t consider myself to be all that much of a fey hipster poseur. (Or one at all, in fact.)

There are some minor niggles with the game that might further dissuade some players who already own at least one Puyo-variant. There is no way to turn off the new rules in single player mode (while Fever Mode is a welcome addition, three- and four-Puyo groups and being allocated different pieces than the enemy player introduce too much randomness), although the multiplayer mode is fully configurable. The controls can be slightly cumbersome on an analogue pad, but not disasterously so. The maximum number of players is two, although three of the host platforms are accustomed to multiplayer games supporting up to four players (and Puyo Puyo 4 also allowed this).

Although the game has been developed as virtually identical versions for four seperate platforms (thanks to the magic of Renderware), not all of these versions are available worldwide. The Dreamcast version is understandably not available outside of Japan (as the Dreamcast is no longer officially supported by Sega in the West). More annoyingly, it turns out that the Playstation 2 version will not be released in the US, as a result of SCEA’s ludicrous and unconscionable policy to block games with 2D graphics from release in their territory (which has also, so far, robbed American players of the Playstation 2 version of Viewtiful Joe as well as various Metal Slug games).

Assuming you can get hold of it, Puyo Pop Fever is well worth picking up at its mid-range price point, whether you’re an existing Puyo fan or just not one yet.

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.)

The most obvious concern from a marketing perspective is that offering a game for free risks making consumers view that product and the entire class of products it belongs to as having no intrinsic value. If I can download your flagship game for free, why would I ever pay for another game from your catalogue?

The second, and potentially much more serious issue, is that a free service is likely to make no provision for customer support. Mobile games, by the nature of the technology they’re working with, present more potential pitfalls for the customer than simply buying a game from a shop for a PC or console. The vendor has to deal with explaining to the customer how the process of downloading and installing a game works (as the vast majority of customers won’t ever have attempted to download a game before) as well as ensuring that the process is completed successfully.

Even for paid services the level of customer support provided can be spotty, but for free games, the customer is effectively left to try to figure out how to obtain the game by themselves. Using the Greystripe example, the process of obtaining the game is made more complicated by the fact that the user must register on their website (providing a valid email address - likely to put off a lot of visitors before they begin), and then retrieve the game manually by visiting a WAP site and entering a numeric code. By way of comparison, most paid services simply involve texting a keyword to a five-digit short number and getting sent a download link via SMS in return.

At each step more customers will give up on the process through confusion, frustration or apathy. This sloughing off of a high percentage of dissatisfied customers who never even get their game is known in marketing circles as “churn” and it’s the polar opposite of what publishers should be aiming to achieve - instead of working to gain customer satisfaction that engenders repeat purchases and good word of mouth, they’re gambling on trying to reach a few people at the expense of pissing off loads more.

Of course none of this is helped by the fact that people seeing the words “free” and “ad-supported” will expect to be bombarded with email and SMS spam, irrespective of whether this is actually the case.

It’s telling that none of the big three mobile games publishers (EA, Gameloft and Glu) have licensed their games for inclusion on Greystripe’s service, and it’s a safe bet that they never will. Surprisingly they’ve managed to tempt some other (smaller but still quite high profile) publishers on board who offer a few decent titles, but the vast majority of the games on offer are ancient low-quality cack, the mobile equivalents of the shovelware that clutters supermarket ‘bargain’ racks (home to gems like Lady Cruncher and Ninjabread Man).

It’s also interesting (but entirely unscientific) to note that when I downloaded a game from Greystripe’s service to research this article, it contained generic house ads, which led to a list of links to gambling and porn sites. I do have to wonder whether their bullish claims for the service are reflected by real world performance.

In spite of all this negativity, I do think that there could be some circumstances where the ad-funded model would be appropriate and would make commercial sense (for instance for distributing game demos and promotional items), but I suspect that gamers will continue to be better served by paying to support games that offer a level of quality and diversity that couldn’t be sustainably delivered through ad-funding or other unproven models. Paying four or five quid to effortlessly, reliably get a quality game is a better deal than jumping through hoops to get games like this.

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.

Title: Gunstar Super Heroes (European title: Gunstar Future Heroes)
Developer: Treasure
Publisher: Sega
Date Published: October 6, 2005 (Japan)
Platform(s): Game Boy Advance
ESRB/PEGI Rating: E / 7+
Players: 1

Gunstar Super Heroes is a pseudo-sequel to Gunstar Heroes (Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, 1993). As the title suggests, the game is a retelling and technological upgrade of its predecessor (in a similar fashion to Super Metroid, Super Street Fighter II, etc.), sitting somewhere between a remake and a true sequel.

The game is a platform shooter (with a dash of mêlée combat) in the vein of a less clunky and more acrobatic Contra. Many elements of the game will be familiar to fans of the original, although there is no direct re-use of content. The game was originally intended to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the original (although obviously it arrived rather too late for that - regardless of what Sega of America’s poorly-researched press releases might tell you) and was highly anticipated by Treasure and Sega fans and critics alike, picking up several Best of Show awards at E3 2005.

Gunstar Super Heroes takes up the story several years after the events of the first game. Following the defeat of end boss Golden Silver by the original Gunstar duo, the Moon (the staging ground of the climactic battle) was destroyed and reformed as four smaller moons, each housing one of the Treasure Gems that powered Golden Silver.

Time passes, the people of Earth colonise the new moons and everything is generally peachy. Then one day, a fifth moon appears - a man-made satellite which serves as the headquarters of the Empire (the bad guys from the first game). The Empire, under the leadership of one General Grey, once again seek to reunite the Treasure Gems and re-awaken the Destructor. So it’s up to a team of secret operatives from the ‘3YE’ organization, styled after the original Gunstar Heroes, to put a stop to the Empire’s plans. This rather convoluted plot is basically an excuse to bring back virtually all of the major characters from the first game.

The game consists of seven main levels, each containing several distinct stages. These can be played through as either Gunstar Red or Gunstar Blue (although the differences between the two characters are minimal - effectively only the graphics of their primary weapon, and some of the cutscene dialogue) at three difficulty levels.

The first level (Earth) is a short tutorial-like level which introduces the player to the standard enemy types (different types of empire troops and small flying robots) that are seen throughout the game. The level culminates in a battle against a huge flying robot who is trying to kidnap Yellow, the Gunstars’ C.O. and pilot. This battle is the first graphical showcase of the game, featuring slick scaling and rotation effects on the boss itself as well as impressive explosion, smoke and flame effects.

Once this level is completed, the player may attempt the next four levels (or moons) in whichever order they chose. Each of these levels is loosely based on one of the first four levels from the original game, with the addition of several new stages, several of which are homages to other classic Sega games.

The first moon is the longest level in the game with five stages. The first of these is a 3D, into-the-screen (or rather, out-of-the-screen) flight on the back of the Gunstar’s jet aircraft, which seems to be intended as a tip of the hat to After Burner. Later in the level, there is an ingenious stage based on Flicky: our hero is trapped in a cave where they must rescue a number of chicks and lead them to the exit hatch, while avoiding being attacked by caterpillar-like creatures. This is made more difficult (and visually impressive) by the fact that the entire cave rotates as the player moves left and right (affecting gravity accordingly). (This is probably my favourite part of the game, and I wish they’d done more with it. - 2008 Ed.) The stage ends with a boss battle against another giant robot, this time one being piloted by Pink and her lackeys Kain and Kotaro, which is stupidly easy to beat - but in true supervillain fashion, this isn’t the last you’ve seen of them.

Moon number two is shorter and less extravagant than the first, consisting of only two stages. The first stage is a vertically-scrolling shoot-’em-up where the player must pilot a helicopter (which can be rotated clockwise and widdershins using the shoulder buttons) and destroy ground and air targets. (This level is based on Thunder Blade.) Trying to plough through this stage with guns blazing routinely ends in disaster, instead the player is forced to pick their way through the level, dodging back and forth to get a clear shot at the smaller and more awkward targets. In the second stage, our intrepid Gunstar boards an airship/flying fortress and squares off against Orange, a muscle-bound soldier, on the wings of a stealth bomber.

Onward to moon three, which is perhaps the level that most closely follows the structure of its inspiration, the celebrated mine-cart stage from Gunstar Heroes. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, this level consists of hurtling down a mineshaft at high speed on a small ‘hovering robot thing’, blasting troops on wheels and trains filled with more troops. The boss of the level is the Seven Force, a robot that can transform into seven forms. This battle is near-identical to the original with the exception of the graphical enhancements afforded by the use of true sprite scaling and rotation.

Moon number four sees the return of the Dice Palace stage from the original game. This level is essentially a Snakes and Ladders board game where the player must roll a dice to get around the board, with each square they land on representing a different mini-stage where they must complete a challenge or fight a miniboss. Unfortunately the structure of the level has been changed for the worse. The dice is represented by a moving cursor instead of being truly random. Likewise, the stage represented by each square is not random, and the high occurrence of backward steps result in the player having to visit nearly all of the squares each time the level is attempted. Some of the new challenges are excellent (such as a giant mangy teddy bear) but some are dull and annoying (for instance the boring platform assault courses that have replaced the item rooms).

On completion of the first four moons, the fifth, Death Star-like moon becomes available. This level begins with a reprise of the ‘long road’ section from Gunstar Heroes (although the various vehicles and robots that the troops attacked you with in the original are sadly absent). This is followed by a horizontally-scrolling spaceship shoot-’em-up section which introduces the novelty of allowing the level to be rotated using the shoulder buttons, but feels a little awkward as it doesn’t allow the player as much freedom of movement as might be expected. The level is finished off with another After Burner sequence, this time heading towards (and into) the Empire’s final base.

The final level (’G-Arc’) consists of a series of boss battles against all the characters encountered during the course of the game (Pink, Orange, Black and Green), this time equipped with new death-dealing vehicles and attacks. As with the original game, this stage is presented as being viewed on a monitor screen being watched by the other evil characters. On completion of this marathon stage, our heroes must then fight the God of Ruin himself, Golden Silver.

Gunstar Super Heroes is an interesting and not entirely unsuccessful attempt by Treasure to revisit one of their best-loved games and update it for a modern audience. While the original game was widely criticised for being too easy, Gunstar Super Heroes requires dexterity and planning on the part of the player to get very far (at least, on the Normal and Hard difficulty levels).

The most disappointing thing about the game (apart from the lack of a two-player mode) is that it now feels very compartmentalised. Instead of the flowing, uninterrupted experience of the original, the game is now broken up into very short stages with no thematic connection between them. Whereas the original game wrung every drop of gameplay from each of its scenarios, Gunstar Super Heroes prefers to burn through piles of unique graphics, enemies and levels without putting them to good use. There are several scenes in the game that feature huge, animated backdrops which are simply run past in a couple of seconds to get from one area to another, and serve no other purpose. Similarly, the dialogue sequences that bookend each stage (complete with screen-filling portraits, as seen in Astro Boy, and surprisingly well-executed voice acting), while not unwelcome, seem like a rather incongruous excess.

Lastly, if we take off the rose-tinted glasses for a second, we might also ask whether the technical improvements on display are really all that impressive, considering the twelve year gap between the two games. Gunstar Super Heroes is a very pretty game, but at no point does it ask anything of the Game Boy Advance that conventional wisdom says shouldn’t be possible.

Even with these criticisms, Gunstar Super Heroes is still a well-made game and probably the best example of its genre on the Game Boy Advance. The controls are responsive, the game feels fair (with the possible exception of the rather random attack patterns of the final boss) and besting particularly challenging stages is very satisfying. That said, it would have been nice if Treasure had concentrated their efforts on blowing our minds instead of lightly tickling our nostalgia glands.

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)

Title: Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun
Developer: SNK
Publisher: SNK
Date Published: 8-6-2000 (Japan)
Platform(s): Neo Geo Pocket Color

Mention the name SNK and the first thing that comes to mind is probably the seemingly endless procession of 2D fighting games that this venerable company produced up until their untimely demise in 2001. (Well, that or Metal Slug.) When it came to providing software for the Neo Geo Pocket Color (their 16-bit challenger to the Game Boy Color), true to form SNK began by cranking out faithful adaptations of their well-known arcade franchises, generally leaving other genres to be addressed by third parties. So it came as something of a surprise when they announced that one of their key titles for Summer 2000 was this… oddity.

Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun (roughly translated, “Do your best, little Neo Geo Pocket man!”) can be (very) loosely categorised as a virtual pet simulation with a collection of thirty-odd (sometimes very odd) minigames hidden inside it.

The main character, the eponymous Neo Poke-Kun, is a little man who lives inside your Neo Geo Pocket Color. (The main scene in the game is a view into his single room apartment in the innards of the machine.) Neo Poke-Kun is a slightly gormless figure with a thin orange body, stick limbs, and a potato-shaped yellow head with antennae and a large orange nose. He likes to sleep and play in his home. The player has no direct control over his actions. However, by manipulating the controls in certain ways they can cause events to occur which affect Neo Poke-Kun and his environment.

The game’s absurdist humour and Gilliamesque visual style are strongly reminiscent of a game for the Mega CD (and later Playstation 2) called Switch.

Home Sweet Home

Neo Poke-Kun’s room has little in the way of furniture but is packed with tiny details. The left wall is taken up by the bathroom door. The right wall is taken up by the front door. Towards the rear of the room is a small tea table and a side cabinet with a phone. The back wall is in semi-darkness, and there are flashing lights, electronic components and a girlie poster visible on it. The floor (where Neo Poke-Kun sleeps) is strewn with (at different times) books, magazines, videos, and a games console. A large, bare lightbulb hangs from the ceiling. The time within the game world is linked to the internal clock in the NGPC, changing the appearance of the room (and altering other aspects of the game) depending on whether it’s morning, evening or night.

The virtual pet aspect of the game allows the player perhaps the most indirect and limited range of controls ever seen since Dragon’s Lair. Tilting the thumbstick in different directions causes small things to happen in Neo Poke-Kun’s room that seem to have no obvious effect on him (such as turning the light on and off, or makes a beckoning hand/foot poke through the letterbox on the front door) Spinning the thumbstick rapidly will cause an accident (or worse, a disaster) to befall Neo Poke-Kun. These can range from things falling on him (including a goose embedding it’s beak in his head), to the bathroom flooding, a hole opening in the ground and swallowing him, or even the room being burnt down or destroyed in an earthquake. After the calamity has passed, Neo Poke-Kun and his room will be restored to normal but Neo Poke-Kun will be emotionally affected.

Ding-Dong…

Pressing the ‘A’ button causes the doorbell to ring, signaling the arrival of a visitor. Most of the time spent observing Neo Poke-Kun is taken up with summoning visitors and watching what they do. Each visitor’s actions have a specific effect on Neo Poke-Kun (making him happy, angry, confused, scared, or embarrassed). There are many, many visitors who can drop in on Neo Poke-Kun and most of them can interact with him in a number of ways. Usually they enter the room, do something and leave (through the front door or the bathroom door). Some cause so much chaos that the video feed cuts to static for a second and when it comes back things have returned to normal. These are some of the more notable ones:

Sideshow pervert: One of the most versatile characters is this rather effeminate Japanese man dressed in a posing pouch. He runs into the room and gestures excitedly for Neo Poke-Kun to do something, for instance tie the ends of his absurdly long moustache together. He will then perform a (often distressingly biological) trick, in this instance (the tamest), skipping with his moustache. His greatest achievement that I have witnessed so far could be called ‘the human party popper’. (Don’t ask.)

Pep talk man: A man in a suit who approaches Neo Poke-Kun and slaps his cheeks with both hands in a rousing, ‘hang in there, son’ fashion. Sometimes he pats Neo Poke-Kun’s crotch instead, or some combination of the two, before leaving with a smile and a wave.

Space Hero: A space adventurer who leaps into the room, performs a heroic pose and then flies out of the room. Neo Poke-Kun is delighted by this.

Stick man: One of the most annoying characters, a featureless yellow stick man who enters the room, and draws a pattern in the air which causes Neo Poke-Kun to become frozen. Sometimes he enters the room with a friend (the pink stick man), and teaches his friend how to draw the pattern.

Old man: An old man with an IV drip stand. He causes Neo Poke-Kun to go into a trance. When Neo Poke-Kun gets close to him he flies into a rage. Sometimes he enters the room and dies, and his ghost floats out of his body. When Neo Poke-Kun approaches his body, the ghost jumps back in and the old man gets up and flies into a rage again.

Bat: A large bat enters the room while Neo Poke-Kun is asleep, flies around for a bit then hangs from the lightbulb and makes a loud, bizarre noise which wakes Neo Poke-Kun up and makes him angry.

There are many, many others (the rabbit, the disgusting dog, the giant nose, the bikini lady, the spy, the tornado, the crocodile, the turtle, the caveman, the drag racer…) with more becoming unlocked as the game progresses.

Ringing the doorbell too frequently can cause the door to break, temporarily preventing the player from summoning visitors. Sometimes the door becomes fitted with a large megaphone, and pressing ‘A’ causes different sounds to be played (including an extract from Beethoven’s Fifth, a pneumatic drill, a cat, and many more, all of which have a different effect on our hero). These events are designed to put the player into a ‘time-out’ from calling new visitors, instead turning the player’s attention to either playing minigames or causing accidents.

Minigames

There is another side to the game quite apart from interacting with and observing Neo Poke-Kun. You see, Neo Poke-Kun is in fact a programmer. If the player consciously tries to keep Neo Poke-Kun happy, Neo Poke-Kun will in turn be more willing to go to work on programming minigames for their entertainment. Pressing ‘B’ while Neo Poke-Kun is idle will replace his lightbulb with a flashing siren, compelling him to run towards the front of the room. The minigame menu will then be presented.

From this menu the player can chose to play any minigame that Neo Poke-Kun has finished developing, and inspect the progress of each game in the pipeline (given as a percentage). Cancelling the minigame menu returns to Neo Poke-Kun’s room (and, if he’s in a good enough mood, prompts Neo Poke-Kun to pick up his tools and leave for work).

The minigames are divided into six generations of five games each. Each generation is more technically complex than the last: the first generation are based around Pong and Breakout, the second includes parodies of Shinobi and Galaga, while the third introduces some games with wireframe 3D elements. If the player can achieve a high enough score or last a certain number of rounds in a given minigame, they get a congratulatory message and an award (denoted with a crown, with exceptional performances getting a plum, bamboo, or pine medal).

It is unclear whether awards translate to any differences in Neo Poke-Kun’s behaviour or environment, but it seems that the number of games successfully completed limits the number of new games that can be unlocked at any given time.

Regardless of how well the player treats Neo Poke-Kun, the rate at which new games can be unlocked is effectively time-limited. Sometimes the game will only throw up negative visitors and/or Neo Poke-Kun will be unreceptive to positive events, steadfastly preferring to sleep rather than going to work.

(As luck would have it, PC versions of three of the minigames have been archived from SNK’s now-defunct website, and can be downloaded here.)

Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun obviously can’t be judged against games with more conventional styles of gameplay. The minigames vary in quality: some are simplistic and frustrating, with unresponsive controls, while a few seem to have had a lot more effort put into them and are reasonably addictive.

Interacting with Neo Poke-Kun manages to hold the player’s interest by the sheer number of possible events and animations that can be triggered (the game’s determination to flout logic and convention ensures that each new element is a surprise), although the minimal interaction and occasional bouts of repetitiveness mean that this side of the game can’t really be played for extended sessions.

The game has minimal Japanese text (one-screen descriptions of each minigame, and occasionally large dialogue boxes with extracts from the credits fly through Neo Poke-Kun’s room). It is equally inexplicable in any language. You should be able to track down a copy through importers or eBay. Failing that, Neo Geo Pocket Colour emulators have reached the stage where they can run the game acceptably well (although I’ve been unable to test all the later minigames yet).

WiiWare finally launched earlier this week. Good news for me, as I’d been looking for something to buy with the Wii Points I’d been sent by Nintendo Europe by way of apology after they accidentally offered the “Star Points to Wii Points” service before it was meant to go live. (It turns out they were offering a fair exchange rate and allowing people to buy enough points at a time to actually buy games with - luckily they closed the loophole before it could tarnish their image as lovable bumbling incompetents. If anyone from Nintendo Europe is reading this, would you kindly go and order more stock of Mario Kart Wii? All the other publishers seem able to keep popular games on UK retail shelves for more than five minutes.)

Back to the point.

As you’ll have gathered, the game I plumped for was Frontier Developments’ LostWinds, a platform adventure designed around the Wii Remote’s cursor control. As every review and preview of the game has already mentioned, it’s immediately apparent that Frontier haven’t skimped on the presentation compared to a full-price release. The game’s visuals are pleasingly rich and detailed, with most things on screen reacting in some way to the wind generated by the movement of the cursor.

It’s also immediately apparent from the primitivist back story cutscene, squiggly particles and non-verbal child protagonist that UK developers should never have been allowed anywhere near Zelda: Wind Waker, as they seem unable to resist shamelessly ripping off its style at every opportunity. (In fairness, LostWinds does have a distinctive style of its own, even if the hero, Toku, does look like Pocoyo cosplaying Link.)

The player controls Toku with the analogue stick and Enril the Wind Spirit with the cursor, which can be used to push objects around by drawing short lines, and later to draw ’slipstreams’ which water, flames and eventually Toku himself can be directed along. The game boils down to toddling around the world solving physical puzzles to allow you to open doors and reach new areas. The puzzles are tricky enough to figure out and execute to be satisfying (the game commendably avoids hand-holding, only interrupting gameplay to explain the key controls of new abilities), but not so hard as to stump the player at any point.

There is an extremely minimal amount of branching (in fact, there’s only one instance in the game when there’s more than one objective open), and while there’s quite a lot of backtracking, there’s often something new to try in previously visited areas. (In any case, backtracking in a 2D world is an entire dimension less irksome than in a 3D one.) Aside from getting lost (as I did for about half an hour at one point) due to the lack of a map or any kind of signposting in the world, it should be possible for most players to breeze through the game in 3-4 hours.

The game’s main shortcoming is it’s length. Many will probably be quick to cite Portal as proof that games don’t have to offer extended playing time to offer something worthwhile, but even Portal offered additional gameplay modes and challenges beyond the main game. LostWinds is being offered through an online store that includes N64 games for the same price, and many key 8-bit and 16-bit arcade adventures (all many times larger than LostWinds) for even less. They may not be as pretty or use the Wii controls, but WiiWare games should offer these benefits in addition to offering a decent amount of longevity, it shouldn’t have to be a trade-off.

For a game that is clearly the product of close study of previous cute puzzle and platform games, LostWinds seems uninterested in the concept of playing with the environment and the control scheme for it’s own sake. There are some secret treasure items to collect (the game doesn’t even bother to explain what these are beyond telling you there are 24 of them), and putting the wind up NPCs will make them perform a humourous precanned animation, but that’s your lot.

The few enemies have little personality and aren’t fun to kill or tense to avoid (death and injury are pretty much meaningless, echoing the system used by the Traveller’s Tales Lego games). The game and it’s environment do not operate on multiple levels, it’s purely a functional backdrop. By way of comparison (and it’s quite a leap, but bear with me), when you enter a new area in Resident Evil 4, you might be presented with half a dozen smaller gameplay threads to follow:

• How can I get that pocket watch?
• Are there any of those blue medallions here?
• I need to look out for trip mines and bear traps.
• How can I open this gate?
• Are there any story clues in this building?
• What happens if I shoot down that bird’s nest?
• …and so on.

LostWinds never does this. Each new gameplay element that is introduced is applied in a handful of puzzles, barely going beyond a tutorial before moving on to the next thing. As such there is zero replayability. It seems odd that Frontier would go to the trouble of building all these elements and then hardly using them, unless they plan to spread out the levels they’ve built very thinly over several episodes. A company headed by a man who coaxed an entire universe out of 32k on the BBC Micro should be the last people who need to be lectured about under-utilising assets.

LostWinds is the gaming equivalent of a toy poodle, ornamental to a fault. The developers seem to have been so preoccupied with making this polished, self-contained, inclusive, elegant artifact that they’ve focussed on these characteristics to the detriment of depth and interactivity. As limited as it is, it seems a bit churlish to quibble when it only costs about £7, and sets such a high bar for future WiiWare titles. It would be disappointing however if the next installment wasn’t bigger, or cheaper, or preferably both. Offering a bit of depth can turn curious impulse buyers into hardcore fans of a franchise.

Freedom Fighters is one of the hidden gems of the last generation, and is a textbook example of why publishers are often wary of releasing games based on original IP. It reviewed well, has a good pedigree, an interesting premise yet still (unless I’m mistaken) bombed at retail.

It is a game that sets out to delivery one narrowly-defined premise exceptionally well. Driving the invading forces back, street by street, is immensely satisfying. The squad mechanic works properly and isn’t just for show (while many games since have featured AI controlled squadmates, only a few have made such a system integral to the gameplay). The save system fits the structure of the game perfectly. Even the way shooting while running is handled (mixing autoaim with significantly reduced accuracy) feels right.

Unfortunately time hasn’t been kind to the game. The presentation was already somewhat threadbare at the time of release, and looks positively archaic today. Kane and Lynch (from the same team) was widely expected to be a glossy update of the Freedom Fighters formula, but for one reason or another didn’t live up to expectations. A proper sequel is long overdue.

(The following was originally published here in February 2004)

Title: Freedom Fighters (working title: Freedom: The Battle for Liberty Island)
Developer: IO Interactive
Publisher: Electronic Arts (EA Games label)
Date Published: September 26, 2003 (UK), October 1, 2003 (US)
Platforms: PC CD-ROM, Nintendo Gamecube, Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox
ESRB/PEGI Rating: T/16+

Freedom Fighters is a third-person squad-based action game developed by Danish codeshop IO Interactive (best known for their stylish Hitman series of stealth/puzzle games). The game is set in an alternate version of New York which has been conquered (along with the rest of the continental United States) by the communist Russians - a scenario lifted fairly shamelessly from a 1986 pen-and-paper RPG by J. Andrew Keith (also called Freedom Fighters, spookily enough).

The player assumes the role of Christopher Stone, a Brooklyn plumber who works with his younger brother (where have I heard that before?). The story begins on the day New York is invaded, with the oblivious Stone brothers making a house call only to find their client has gone missing and the place is over-run with Russian troops. After evading capture, events continue to snowball out of control, gradually pushing the reluctant Chris into the role of resistance leader.

Nuclear submarines have surfaced in the harbour. Tanks are rolling in the streets. TV news networks are spewing out hate-mongering propaganda (no change there, then). Can Chris save the American Way, or should he have stuck to fixing leaky taps and charging ridiculous fees?

In gameplay terms, this situation translates into a series of missions set in discreet (but quite large) areas of the city, interspersed with periods of recuperation at the Rebel Base (initially located in the Brooklyn sewers). A mission zone might contain a number of objectives, some of which might have a positive effect in another mission zone (for instance destroying a helipad will prevent the Russians defending a target with gunships, destroying a bridge will cut off troop reinforcements). The ultimate objective in each mission zone is to raise the Stars and Stripes above an important building in the area, thereby bringing it under rebel control.

At its simplest, Freedom Fighters is played as a third-person shooter (imagine the on-foot sections of Grand Theft Auto III except without the cripplingly awful control scheme). Chris can carry a melee weapon, a pistol and one heavy weapon (assault rifle, shotgun, sub-machine gun, sniper rifle, machine gun or rocket launcher) at a time, and can swap weapons for any he finds lying around. When an enemy is fairly close by and in Chris’s field of vision, the game will employ a limited autoaim functionality. For more distant or precise targeting, depressing the left trigger button (right mouse button) enters a precision aiming mode, drawing the camera close to Chris’s shoulder and drawing a crosshair. Chris can also sneak around to avoid detection, and can jump over and mantle onto ledges and obstacles fairly fluidly. He can also carry a limited number of grenades, molotov cocktails and medical kits.

It isn’t long before Chris finds himself outnumbered by Reds, and this is where the game’s best feature comes into play - squad leadership. From the start of the game, Chris can walk up to friendly characters and recruit them. They will then follow him, and respond to simple orders. As Chris makes his way through the city, certain noble acts (healing wounded civilians, blowing up Russian buildings, raising the flag) will gain him Charisma points, which fill up a Charisma bar. Each time the bar is filled (which takes progressively more and more points as the game wears on), Chris can command an additional sidekick, up to a maximum of twelve.

Squad members can be commanded individually or as a group, to Follow, Scout/Attack, or Stay/Defend. If the player can find a suitable vantage point, they can assign these commands to ‘waypoints’ on the ground, so squaddies can be directed in battle over a large area. The squad A.I. is fairly robust, able to pick its way through complicated routes and detect and engage enemies in hard-to-reach places. Occasionally it will get a little confused indoors (ordering squad members to scout upstairs by gesturing at the stairs will cause them to wait on the stairs - logical, but slightly cumbersome). If a squad member gets seriously wounded, they can be revived by using a medical kit on them. Alternatively, fallen squad members can be replaced by fresh recruits if Chris can find resistance hideouts.

The game employs a fairly strict savegame system. During a mission, a ‘quick save’ can be made if the player finds and opens a manhole (of which there usually less than half a dozen scattered around each area). Quick saves are not kept when the player exits the game, the only way to save progress is to return to the rebel base after completing an objective.

Freedom Fighters is, in essence, a ground-level version of Syndicate (except without the vehicles or crowds of civilians, or the cool cyberpunk stylings - but you get the idea). The control scheme is very well implemented, managing to allow for simplified combat without completely removing any element of skill. The emphasis is much more on arcade-style immediacy than excessive simulation, which is a breath of fresh air in a genre mainly populated with SWAT teams and Tom Clancy’s progeny. That is not to say that the game is a mindless shoot-’em-up. The player is constantly challenged to formulate sound strategies and carry them out, making the game as much a test of awareness and judgment as one of reflexes.

Things occasionally go awry when the game tries to strike out too far from its core competency. Around the midway point solo missions start to crop up, which although fun in their own right are rather more linear and less satifying than the blood and thunder of block-by-block street battles. Even taking the solo missions and variety of objectives into account, the game could be characterised as being repetitive.

While it’s evident that most of the developers’ efforts went into perfecting the squad A.I., at times it seems that the rest of the game has been neglected as a result. There isn’t much to see or do off of the beaten track in this version of New York. It feels far less alive than Grand Theft Auto III’s Liberty City. There isn’t much for the player to manage or accumulate on a long-term basis, beyond health, ammo and charisma. The squadmates are pretty much personality-free clones, without names or even enough faces to go around. (Often you will have identical twins or triplets in your squad.) And there is little incentive to replay the game once it has been cleared.

The game can also be frustrating, but it’s usually frustration of the good, ‘just one more go’ kind. One sour note comes in the form of personnel carriers that drive around some of the mission zones. These seemingly indestructible vehicles will go around the same route forever, always stopping at the same point to disgorge a fresh batch of (far too many) Soviet troops, like some kind of militaristic clown car. Worst of all, if they run Chris over he’s instantly dead, which is a little bit annoying seeing as they’re virtually silent, the player’s field of vision is quite restricted and there’s no other traffic to avoid.

Freedom Fighters is one of the rare games (although less so than previously) that has been released on all four major home formats virtually simultaneously. As far as I am aware there is little difference between the versions (apart from the obvious issues of controls, screen resolution, loading times, etc.). Graphically all versions look pretty similar (or to put it another way all versions are held back by the need to support the aging PlayStation 2).

Low polygon counts and high resolution textures are the order of the day. The colour scheme is nicely muted (although occasionally makes the world appear to be viewed through a yellow filter), and there are some pleasing spot effects (rising walls of flame, ‘waves’ of rain against rooftops). On the Gamecube version there are some rare instances of ’sparklies’ (cracks at the edges of polygons) and some slowdown when a very large number of moving characters are drawn on screen. The PC version, which you might expect to look the best, actually shows up the angular nature of the modelling a little too harshly.

All versions of the game receive the same benefit when it comes to the audio portion. The sound effects and speech are on the right side of average, with the occasional rogue stereotype slipping in. The musical score (composed by Jesper Kyd and performed by the Hungarian Radio Choir) is a superbly atmospheric fusion of dour Russian chanting and stark Vangelis-like bleepings.

No doubt many readers having gotten this far will have some reservations about the game’s overtly jingoistic, trigger happy premise (I know I did). Thankfully, for the most part, IO Interactive have chosen to keep things fairly light-hearted. There is the occasional fist-pumping speech that will no doubt be taken at face value by American conservatives, but for the most part the writers have managed to steer a course between offensive nationalism and obvious parody.

Overall, Freedom Fighters is worth checking out if you are partial to action games, especially seeing as many retailers (in the UK at least) are offering it at a knock-down price.

On Saturday I attended the GameCamp 08 event organised by The Guardian. This was a meeting of a couple of hundred people with an interest and ideas about games of all kinds, modeled after the BarCamp series of gatherings, or in my frame of reference, like a larger-scale, greatly more informal and parallelised version of Dorkbot.

Being over-tired and under-prepared, I gravitated towards presentations by people I’d heard of for the most part, and away from things to do with table-top gaming and ARGs. (I’m not convinced that ARGs - essentially very weakly interactive marketing tools - have any place in an event about games, but as the day had been partly organised by an ARG company, there they were.) With talks going on in seven rooms at once, it was impossible to see everything, but I regret that I didn’t see some of the more esoteric talks (the controller hacking sounded intriguing) or anything focussed on MMOs.

I had originally planned to give a little post-mortem talk about what I’ve been doing in the mobile games sector for the past couple of years. The theme and message was that the mobile games industry had become preoccupied with fighting the ’symptoms’ (complaining about device fragmentation, fiddly controls, failure to address the casual audience, etc.) rather than tackling the underlying ‘disease’ (the fact that mobile games companies do vastly less to gain the trust and participation of their audience than their counterparts on any other format, when the nature of the platform and distribution method demands that they do much more). But it quickly became apparent that what I’d prepared would perhaps be a bit too specialised for the general audience.

Oh alright, I bottled it.

Highlights of the day for me included Ste Curran’s talk on games as a facilitator for shared experiences (which makes it sound a lot dryer than the set of funny and engaging vignettes it actually was), the afternoon’s rather freeform chat touching on Flash development, Ukranians, Peter Molyneux and Twitter, and the closing meeting of the ‘People’s Revolutionary Committee’ where many gaming bugbears (including console exclusives, tutorial levels, and Twitter, again) were condemned to death by firing squad.

All in all, it was a great opportunity to meet some very bright and games-obsessed people, and I hope we don’t have to wait a year for the next one.

My photos are here, and various attendees’ photos are here.

“Scrumper is a game that allows the player to engage in the ‘victimless’ crime of apple theft from the comfort of their own home. The object of the game is to catch as many falling apples as possible.”

It has already received glowing testimonials from beta testers:

“it actually seems fun now”

“are you sure it’s not virus?”

You can download the game (Windows only at present) from here and further explanation is here.

Judging by the traffic and feedback that I got from the earlier Games for Windows 2000 article (where I collected together workarounds that had been found to allow various supposed “Windows XP only” games to run on Windows 2000) it would seem that there’s still a small but dedicated userbase for this venerable OS among PC gamers.

In the intervening months, two industrious Windows 2000 stalwarts going by the handles of OldBoy2k and OldCigarette have taken up the gauntlet to fix every artificially incompatible game. The results of their efforts so far are catalogued on their Windows 2000 Gaming forum.

Most intriguingly, OldCigarette has developed a collection of API wrappers which goes some way to providing a general purpose solution for current and future games afflicted with these problems. In theory, the Windows 2000-using gamer need no longer rely on the good grace of the community to develop a workaround for a specific game - with this toolkit all they have to do is note the error messages produced when they try to run the game and simply drop relevant DLLs into the game’s working directory.

(There’s slightly more mucking about than that required initially - copying some files, a registry tweak and a reboot - but once it’s set up once configuration for subsequent games is minimal.)

I’ve so far successfully employed this box of tricks to play Stranglehold. Next on the list is Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, assuming I can circumvent the utterly deranged battery of booby traps that Relic are passing off as an installer program. But rare exceptions aside, I certainly have more confidence in buying Games for Windows (XP/Vista only) branded games now that I know that I can run them. Take that, inevitably rising tide of progress!

In the last couple of years, the line between PC and console gaming has been (in some respects) almost completely erased. The simultaneous release of high profile titles on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 is becoming the norm. It’s easy to forget that before the mid-1990s, computer and console gaming were completely different worlds - two hobbies running in parallel with very little crossover between them.

While console gamers gawped at Starfox, PC gamers chuckled to themselves and went back to X-Wing. We’d … seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Of course then the Playstation came along and all the fascinating things people had been doing under DOS got swept aside, but for a few short years PC gamers had a legitimate reason to be smug.

Today, the vast majority of development projects are railroaded into long-established genres, known quantities where schedules and budgets can be (usually over-optimistically) drawn up at the outset. Back in the early 1990s, developers and publishers seemed to have no such play book to work from, resulting in a raft of games that were staggeringly ambitious and seemed to have no obvious precedents - games which would be almost inconceivable as commercial ventures today.

Some such games caught the gaming public’s imagination, allowing their creators (such as Sensible, Origin, Bullfrog, or the Bitmap Brothers) to found dynasties and ensuring their games are still widely remembered. Other games (such as Alone in the Dark) didn’t stay the course, but inspired later, more mainstream games (Resident Evil) to secure their place in history as a footnote.

There were still other, equally fascinating games that haven’t survived into posterity.

One such game was Stunt Island, developed by The Assembly Line and published by Disney Software for the PC in 1992. Stunt Island was a game that had the odds for historical recognition stacked against it from the outset. It shipped on six floppies bundled with a 180-page manual and a poster map, pushing its retail price towards £49.99, not a reasonable price for any game, then or now. As far as I’m aware it never saw a budget or CD-ROM re-release, and its status as Disney’s intellectual property has frozen any chances of reviving the franchise stiffer than Walt himself.

As one of the lucky/spendthrift few who did play it the first time around, I still regard it as one of the most impressive pieces of software I’ve ever seen, as well as the main reason I’m so disappointed when each new GTA game fails to implement a demo recording/editing mode.

Stunt Island was the brainchild of Adrian Stephens, a maths guru who had previously worked on the cult Amiga and ST cyberpunk puzzle-cum-shooter thing Interphase (and subsequently worked on projects as diverse as Comix Zone, Sonic X-treme, Vigilante 8, and most recently the True Crime series of GTA-alikes for Activision).

The game operates on two distinct levels. The core of the game is a flight simulator, which allows the player to fly one of 48 Gouraud-shaded aircraft around the titular Island, and to try their hand at flying 32 predefined stunt missions (storming a barn, flying under bridges, parachuting off a building and other such Hollywood action staples). More intriguingly, the game also provides what is essentially a complete virtual studio for producing machinima (eight years before the term was coined).

Creating an original movie in Stunt Island comprises of three main stages (which can be iterated through multiple times depending on the scope of the film and the number of scenes required).

The first port of call is the extremely flexible Set Design mode, which allows the placement of props, vehicles, cameras and trigger objects anywhere on the island, and even allows for some simple scripting to trigger events, switch cameras and direct the movement of entities during the action phase. All of the game’s pre-canned stunt missions were created using this tool, and while it’s slightly cumbersome by modern UI standards, it’s still possible with a bit of patience to build fairly complex scenes.

Once the scene has been set up, the player/user must then ‘fly’ the stunt. (The game’s terminology is heavily geared towards aircraft-based stunts, but in actuality the player’s controls can be bound to any vehicle or prop. They can even just park out of shot and let the cameras capture the scripted actions that they’ve programmed in the Set Design mode.)

Finally, the footage from each of the (1-8) cameras recording the scene is fed into the Editing Suite, where it can be spliced together into a final cut, and where a soundtrack and visual effects (fades, titles, etc.) can be added. The game shipped with an external player program to allow films to be distributed to people without the full game, and there is evidence that this subsequently happened on a small scale (on AOL and Compuserve mainly, as the game predates the popularisation of the World Wide Web).

Following the movie making process from conception to completion demanded quite a lot of effort on the part of the user, but it was possible to achieve good results, and the process itself taught a lot about movie editing and game scripting. Although most of my own efforts have long since succumbed to hard disk failure, a few Stunt Island epics have latterly made their way onto YouTube. (Unfortunately most of these are rubbish, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it was possible to make something vaguely watchable.)

Stunt Island was able to realise its extraordinarily ambitious brief thanks to two things. The first was Stephens’ very robust engine technology, which allowed the game to render the (massive) game world as one contiguous map, through the use of a rudimentary Level of Detail system. Interesting scenes in the world were rendered in more detail (for instance zooming in on a city would pop up individual roads and buildings).

The accompanying map listed the coordinates of dozens of places of interest that were tucked away (including the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz island, St. Andrew’s Castle, Stonehenge, farms, towns, army bases, railroads and aqueducts). Of course by modern standards it looks like how Google Earth might look in the world of Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing video, but at the time it was an impressive technical feat.

The second enabler was that the developers very cleverly limited the scope of what would be simulated within the world. Planes, simple landscapes and military hardware had been the stock in trade of 3D computer games for many years; rendering convincing people (to say nothing of trying to animate them) was a non-starter. Basing the game around traditional Hollywood stunt work (going so far as having quite a lot of in-depth background material and an interview with a Stunt Coordinator in the manual) explained away these limitations quite well.

Very few games have followed in Stunt Island’s footsteps. The dependency on permanent storage and a (cursor-driven) editing mode has until recently been a major obstacle to the development of similar games on consoles. In the PC gaming space, the emphasis on ever-increasing graphical realism and diminishing consumer tastes for games that demand extensive learning and time investment have had a similar effect.

The only game in recent memory even slightly similar has been Lionhead’s The Movies, which rather awkwardly married Bullfrog’s tried and tested Theme Park/Hospital business management formula to the popularity of The Sims series (both as a game and a machinima-creation platform) and sank without trace.

In the wake of the Nintendo DS and Wii, and the rise of the various online distribution platforms (e.g. Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network), there seems to be a more positive attitude to experimentation throughout the industry of late. I believe that in this climate, a canny developer could reinvigorate the “virtual movie studio” concept. Nintendo’s Mii system (as used to great effect in Wii Sports, Wii Play and the upcoming Mario Kart Wii) has shown that gamers aren’t obsessed with photorealism. A “Mii Movie Studio”, supported by a channel on the dashboard (where all Wii users could view and give feedback on user-generated movies), could be huge.

Failing that, there’s always the chance that Rockstar will finally do the right thing with GTA4. We can but dream.