What makes games fun?

It's an interesting question. A better one, though, might be... what makes play fun?

Bet you've not made one of these since you were a kid...

There's a lot of psychology being worked on right now on why games are fun, but some of it is common sense. Here's a quick laundry list I put together of what's fun and why.

• Are you emotionally engaged?
  That's fun... or at least, it's engaging. It makes you feel something.
• Are you narratively engaged?
  (Do you want to see what happens, or how the story ends?)
• Are you physically engaged?
  Are you pressing buttons and getting feedback? Are the buttons consistent? Is there room to learn a new motor skill?
• Are you learning?
  Learning is fun, provided that there is feedback and reward.
• Are you projecting?
  Do you feel attached to the character you're interacting with? (eg. move your mouse to the top of the screen, and smack it there. You'll feel a little psychomotor feedback, as if the mouse is "sticking" on something. That's projection. It's what lets you feel the tip of a screw when you're using a screwdriver).
• Are you learning new projection-related skills that are unlike things you do in everyday mundane life?
  eg. Rolling things up in Katamari Damacy, jumping 3 stories in Crackdown, dreaming about tetris blocks, creating Portals. You can tell if you're doing this right, because you'll look around your mundane everyday world, and think about how to do those things within it...
• Is there direct feedback in the system? Are your actions connected directly to the actions you see on screen? Are the consequences mostly immediate (ties to physicality) or long term (ties to narrative).
• Are you competing with another player, human or otherwise?
  Humans are competitive animals, and a lot of play in animals is to lay down the rules for territory and battle.
• Are you collaborating with another player, human or otherwise?
  Humans are societal animals, and a lot of play in animals is to lay down the rules for cooperation and collaboration.
• Does it provide a change in state for the player, preferably into a "flow" state? (eg. Rez/Geometry Wars/Zuma = Trance/Flow state) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Ultimately, a fun game requires:

• Feedback - actions have consequences, preferably immediate (unless narrative)
• Progressive induction - that is, start easy, get progressively harder. Challenge the player - but at a rate appropriate to them so that it causes frustration, but not too much.
• Rewards - doing something cool must provide a reward.

Fun may or may not require:

• Narrative engagement
• Physical engagement
• Emotional engagement
• General learning
• Competition
• Collaboration
• Projective learning
• Induction into "flow" state

... but usually a fun game will require at least one or more of these ancillary categories to provide depth and engagement. The most powerful of these are Flow, Projective Learning, Competition and Emotional/Narrative engagement, in roughly that order. And they're also that difficult to attain, in that order.

That's my take on it anyway.

Examples

Note that I'm only listing the dominant traits of these games. For example, Crackdown has a small narrative element, but it's really really small - certainly nothing compared to GTA4's storyline.

Panzer Dragoon Orta - a game which involves a lot of General Learning (to get the patterns right), Physical engagement, a smidge of Narrative engagement, and some gorgeous graphics

Rez
Physical engagement, General Learning, Induction into "flow" state

Crackdown
Physical engagement, General Learning, Competition & Collaboration, Projective Learning

Indigo Prophecy
Narrative engagement, Physical Engagement, Emotional engagement, General Learning

Portal
Narrative engagement, Emotional Engagement, Physical Engagement, General Learning, Projective Learning

Project Gotham Racing
Physical Engagement, General Learning, Projective Learning, Competition

The Suffering
Narrative Engagement, Physical Engagement, Emotional Engagement, General Learning

Schizoid
Physical Engagement, General Learning, Competition, Collaboration

PacMan
Physical Engagment, Projective Learning (hugging the walls), Induction into "flow" state, General Learning

Rock Band
Physical Engagement, General Learning, Projective Learning, Collaboration

So what's the Upshot?

If you're designing a game, see if you're missing any of these elements, and try to figure out how to get them in. You don't need all of them, but most games will involve some kind of General Learning (ie. they're not totally random because that's unfair - even Minesweeper won't let you click on a bomb on your first move) by default. Identifying which elements of your game correspond to each of these categories can also help you to refine those experiences.

Schizoid!

You might not have seen this new XBOX Live Arcade game, and if you haven't, you should definitely check it out.

This is my ship... you can have the Red one. No, I don't care that blue is your favorite color. It's mine! Mine!!!

Schizoid (by Torpex Games) is a two player co-op game that you can play over the network or on the couch, and it has a really simple game mechanic - the Blue player can kill Blue things, and the Red player can kill Red things. The opposite color to your ship is deadly. And that's it. No controls other than a single stick to worry about, it's pure distilled simplicity, and rather addictive.

Never mind the tortuous Uberschizoid mode which has you as a single player try in vain to split your brain in half and control two ships at once - one with the left stick, and one with the right.

Obscure Schizoid Reference involving flapjacks, brainwashing, left vs right handedness, and black Russian cigarettes

I met creator Jamie Fristrom at Gamefest last week, and he can't complete it on Uberschizoid mode, although he's come pretty close. Other people at Torpex have done it, which probably means that they're drummers.

Check it out and download the demo for free - what do you have to lose but your sanity?

Super Cool Universe Sandbox Simulator

Digg this up and give the author some love: http://digg.com/pc_games/Fantastic_Universe_Simulator (and by the way, there's a video linked from the Digg article, so check that out too).

It's a pretty amazing project... everything is controllable via a WiiMote. I've seen this running on a huge projection screen, and it's frankly just dazzling. You could play with this for hours.

Especially the galaxies crashing bits...

Here's a screenshot of a physically accurate Saturn, with all of its moons:

New "This Is Vegas" Gameplay Movie

Check it out on Gamespot Video :)

Basically, it's the tutorial for Club Aqua, and shows you a lot of what partying will be like in the finished game.

And it's awesome ;-)

This Is Vegas: Our Illustrious Leader

http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/previews/20365/First_Look_This_Is_Vegas.html

G4 TV covers This Is Vegas from GDC. Look, it's Alan Patmore, Surreal Head Honcho.

:D

Games and Storytelling: Tropes

This article was originally written a couple of months ago for the Surreal Game Design blog, which is currently deceased. I'm publishing it here instead.

I know what you're thinking. Let me guess. I can see it on the tip of your tongue. What the hell is a trope? Is this British lunatic making up words again?

A trope is a kind of story-telling shorthand. Camera cuts are tropes. Camera dissolves are tropes. The good guy in a Western riding off into the sunset at the end of the movie is a trope. The nerdy guy getting the girl by the end of the teen movie? That's a trope too.

They're like memes, but instead of being Just infectious ideas, they're specifically memes that relate to how a story is told. The only other meme with a given name I've ever come across is the ear worm.

The really cool thing about tropes (other than the information they convey) is that unlike most industry short-hand, they actually have cool names. I mean, where else are you going to come across a camera move called "The Khan"? (Although it should really be spelled The Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!)^[1]

Of course, video games have their own particular brands of tropes specific to them. After all, once you have a new story-telling medium, it suddenly accrues tropes like barnacles. The one everyone has heard of is "Crate Expectations", and it's now a sport to rank games on the amount of time you have to play until you hit the first crate in the game.

Why do we like tropes?

Well, for a start, once they become embedded in the media, you don't have to think about them any more. You don't think about hitting the Start button to pause your game... and nowadays, all kinds of things can be expected to live in the start menu - like your current list of objectives. That's a trope too.

Not only are they a useful user interface tool, but they push the medium along. Look at an old movie from the 60s. (Sorry, film students... I'm going to pick on Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey now as specific examples). They're shit. Well, okay, maybe that's a bit strong. They're not shit. They exemplify the inherent beauty in the medium, and they were stellar works for their time... but the medium has moved on. They're now boring as all hell, and no matter how emphatically anyone whispers "Rosebud"^[2] into a boom mike, and no matter how many candles of lighting you throw at it to make it have the largest depth of field ever imaginable (even if the actors get all squinty), I'm still going to only get 15 minutes into the movie at the end of the day before I get bored and turn it off. As for 2001, let's face it, you're only going to watch it for the end these days, and there's only so many times you can watch that without getting so completely mindblowingly high that you start trying to sync it up to Dark Side Of The Moon.

Why?

The medium has moved on. We learned the short-hand. And once you know the short-hand, you don't need the long version any more. Everything these days is fast paced Jerry Bruckheimer cuts^[3] and always starts in media res. In fact, some media relies on tropes for its effectiveness. Spoof films like Airplane, for example. Horror movies pretty much require them - you just don't get that "Don't go in there!" feeling unless you've seen how it goes down when they walk through that door a million times before.

Where things get interesting is when a new trope hits and spreads like wildfire. The rage flashes in The Suffering were a horror videogame trope that hadn't appeared before in the medium (although they'd been used in other places in film before). Possibly the most well known new camera trope in a long time has to be the Bullet Time sequences in The Matrix movies (which then quickly jumped the divide and started showing up in video games as well - heck, Stranglehold even called it Tequila Time). Michael Gondry had previously tried to get the ball rolling with a number of music videos along the same lines, and then The Gap commercials writ it in stone, but it took The Matrix for it to become a trope. And now it shows up everywhere - even in animation where frankly, it's not even that flashy because... well.. it's animation, and you can do anything you like in animation, just by drawing whatever you want to see.

So what's the brand new trope I care about right now?

That'd be something I just saw in Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And I'll talk about it in my next (hopefully much shorter) post.

(Crate photo stolen from tvtropes.org)

^[1] Which brings me right back to the earworms... but I digress.
^[2] Spoiler Warning: It's the sled. The sled is called Rosebud.
^[3] Jerry Bruckheimer cuts are cuts which last no longer than 5 seconds. Watch any Bruckheimer movie, and you'll see that none of his cuts last longer than this. It's what makes them chock-full of actiony stuff.

Cooking Mama: The Spitting Pea Soup Edition

I love Cooking Mama. It combines two of my favorite genres – Iron Chef and The Exorcist.

Don’t worry… Mama will fix it… Mama fixes everything…

THIS IS VEGAS!

We just announced the game we've been working on for what seems like... well... almost 4,000 years now :)

Welcome to Vegas - or our deliciously twisted parody version of it at least - in the new game coming soon from Midway and Surreal Software - THIS IS VEGAS.

Trailer here... Articles here...

We'll be up on IGN all week... check it OUT!

. . . . . . . . . .

German coverage is up online too... scanned from Play3 magazine

Projection (... or what do you do if you can't sleep 'cos all you dream of is Tetris)

How can you tell when you have an absolutely fantastic brand new game mechanic which is going to take the world by storm?

Surprisingly, it's really easy. If it's fundamentally that different, enjoyable, and - dare I say it? - addictive, you're going to dream about it.

(And yes, I know, addictive is a bit of a dirty word when it comes to games... it has bad connotations... but heck, if you're going to play a game a lot and keep coming back for more, it'd better damn well be at least somewhat addictive. If you don't prefer the entirely way too honest approach, please pretend that I said fun instead).

Seriously. I've known people who after playing Tetris nearly nonstop for a week started dreaming about it. All they saw in their minds eyes as they got the necessary RDA of beauty sleep was falling colored blocks. Most of them asked for their money back, claiming that they'd had better dreams after watching horror movies.

It's not limited to dreams though. In my own personal experience, I've played Crackdown and found myself staring off the deck at work thinking "Yeah, I could jump that!". Of course, a saner head prevailed, and also, of course, I wouldn't have been able to. I'd have been in traction, probably taking all my meals through a straw. But for some reason, the game had attached itself to my brain in such a fundamental way that I had entertained the notion for a tiny moment of time. Okay, for a week or two. Yes, I'll admit it, I was looking at most of the buildings around me as I walked into work figuring out how to scale them. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a powerful game mechanic.

Katamari Damacy? After I played that for the first time, I found myself wandering around idly wondering if I could roll things up. All kinds of things. Usually huge things like cars and buses.

Midnight Club II? Well, let's just say that if I was driving the car I am now back then, I'd probably have enough speeding tickets to roast a nice steak*.

Viva Piñata has never had quite this effect on me. Halo 3? Nope, sorry, it didn't do that. (Mind you, neither did the first two, and Half Life - as much as I love that game... as much as my old producer at Sierra told the AP who gave me a copy in my first month there "not to give the programmers crack when we're trying to ship a product" didn't cause as much as a peep).

Portal though... Portal is a different matter. Portal had that effect. I spent a good while dreaming about how I could create holes in things that led to other holes, allowing me to travel through those holes, in an altogether wholly weird dreaming experience.

So what does this have to do with projection?

OK, imagine that you're holding a screwdriver. Put the screwdriver into a screw head. Feel yourself turn the screw. The weird thing is, as you're slotting the screwdriver home, you can feel the tip of the screwdriver touching the screw as if you had little touch sensitive nerves right on the end of the screwdriver.

This is a wonderful human ability. It allows us to do all kinds of things from driving to using a mouse. (If you're wondering what I mean by that, slam your cursor to the top of the screen right now. Note the word slam; because when it stops there, it feels like it hit something. Of course it didn't - and your mouse kept on moving... but that's what it felt like). If you will, it allows us to push our senses outside of our body, and manipulate our environment with tools as if the tools themselves were part of us. And it's cool.

I've got a theory that new gameplay experiences actually trigger a whole new projection learning experience in the brain. It's like you've never experienced this way of interacting with something before, and you need to digest it. If it's compelling enough, and fun enough, you'll need to process it harder. And if it's something just a little out of the ordinary, you'll end up dreaming about it.

Maybe that's what great gameplay is all about... pushing the boundaries of our experience outside of these fragile little shells and into a whole new vista.

I just wish that it was easier to reverse engineer. The problem with this kind of massively compelling gameplay mechanic experience is that while it'd be awesome for every game to have the power to make you spend your nights dreaming about it, it's really hard to come up with those kinds of mechanics. It's easy to spot them - but hard to create them.

But heck, I really know them when I see them. And apparently, my dreams know them too.

* First take your steak, marinade it, add salt and pepper. Then take a charcoal grill. Use the speeding tickets to light the grill.

This post was originally written for the Surreal Software Game Design Blog.

Set Piece: Lessons Learned from BioShock

This post was originally written for the Surreal Game Design blog back in December. I'm publishing it here.

One of the great things about BioShock (other than that it's a lovely first person horror game with more than a couple of very cute homages to other great games in the genre... and yes, I'm going to be quite annoyingly company pimpingly obvious here and say The Suffering, but also Half Life) is the way it grabs you and takes you on a fantastic guided tour through the environment they've created.

They did a great job with this. I'm not just talking about the bathysphere journey at the beginning of the game - although to be honest, it's probably the most overt way in which they do this, and it certainly sets the tone for the adventure you're about to go on.

The cool thing is how they do it in other areas of the game.

Take, for example, that big room near the Kashmir Restaurant right at the beginning of the game. The one that you need to get into an elevator and go up. (There are several broken elevators nearby). The elevator is small, and there's only one direction you can look. And because of that, you end up with an impressive crane shot which beautifully displays all of the effort they put into the art of that room.

They do this in other places too. Anywhere there's a large art set piece, they make damn sure that you get to enjoy it - either by making sure that the only route you can take is one that will expose you to it. Stairwells, elevators, corridors... all of them serve to make sure that you get to see the wonderful art deco architecture of it all.

It's a great trick, and one that works very organically. You hardly know they're doing it - certainly, you might not notice it unless you've spent a lot of time studying film. They employ similar devices in their horror moments, with great use of light and shadow to highlight and amplify the moments.

The environment isn't just a theme that gets tacked onto the game, nor is it a way to funnel random monsters at the player. The environment itself is an integral part of the experience - and it's treated as such.

And because of that, it's lovely, unique, and probably a huge part of why BioShock gets such great reviews.

Full Disclosure: I've not finished Bioshock yet. I'm near the end though. But heck, I know what I like. I finally finished Bioshock (since the Surreal Game Design blog went down). Meh. I was unimpressed by the ending. It could have done with some kind of coda to wrap things up.
Even More Disclosure: The most obvious homage to The Suffering is the "body in the locker" trick. And the most obvious one to Half Life is the fact that you're told to go grab a crowbar or something for a weapon.
Too Much Disclosure: Half of the guys here actually jumped up and down when BioShock came out, and we all gathered around the monitor of the Retail XBOX Dev Kit we were playing it on... and the verdict was unanimous. Not only did we all love it, but for a while there, we were all feeling incredibly nostalgic and suddenly wanted to make another horror game. Touché, 2K Games, touché!

Surreal Game Design Blog - Gone :(

Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control¹, the Surreal Game Design blog had to be shut down.

Which sucks, but there you go.

I'll be dribbling out the articles I had stacked up over the next few weeks. I'll be aiming at one a week.

¹Lawyers, eh?

Get 'em while they're hot - Weighted Companion Cubes!

Woohoo! Valve has released Weighted Companion Cubes for you to buy!... and to celebrate this event, I (ahem) wrote a song...

[To the tune of Jonathon Coulton's Still Alive...]

Aperture science
We sell you our cubes because we can
To the people out there who
Liked Portal…

They’re really quite awesome
We made them from felt and bits of fluff
Buy one right now straight from us
Maybe wear one on your head…

If you buy one today we will throw in a rake
And a catalytic cracker and maybe some cake
If you only buy one
We still have half a ton
For the people who still want to buy…

They’re really quite fluffy
Buy two and hang them in your car
Right above your dashboard it’s so sexy.
Or use them as keychains.
And jangle them with your keys, ha-ha.
Show them to your friends because they’ll be so happy for you

Now these faux companions are a beautiful sight
If you need a quick gift they’re the best you will find
And we know that you’ve yearned to get one but were spurned
Quickly buy now for two-nine-ninety five.

Go ahead and buy one
You know you can’t help it, so buy five
Maybe you can build a wall with Velcro.
Could make a fort too
Just buy several hundred ha-ha, ha-ha
Anyway, these cubes are great
They’re just so friendly and warm.

Look at them they’re light grey with bits of pink too
If we had any male ones they would have bits of blue
And we could breed them by the tonne
Or we could breed them just for fun
Sell them for twenty nine ninety five…

Sell them all twenty nine ninety five

Buy them right now twenty nine ninety five

Squishy not plastic twenty nine ninety five

They will run out twenty nine ninety five

Ninety five…

Surreal Game Design Blog - Relocated

For annoying legal reasons, the Surreal Game Design blog has now been relocated to http://www.GamesGoneFeral.com.

Which is cool and awesome and everything... but yet, also slightly annoying in an "Oh my god... why!?!?!?!" kind of way.

Ah well. It's still the same blog, the same writers (including me), and everything else... it's just not ... er... an official Surreal Game Design blog. If you know what I mean. (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)

Kill the Silent Polygamist? Never!

New posting up on the Surreal Game Design blog.

At some point (probably 2 months from now) I'll start resyndicating those posts here. But for now, go check 'em out!

Surreal's Game Design Blog

I've finally gotten around to starting writing for the Surreal Game Design blog, where you can find all things Surreal and Game Designy.

I've got a bunch of posts coming up on there soon, so keep your eyes peeled. Meanwhile, here's my Hello World post.

The Right Way to develop games...

From RockPaperShotgun, an interview with Kim Swift of Valve on Portal:

KS: I think it’s the process. As far as screen-testing goes, it’s usually not until the end of the movie process. We started testing as soon as we got here. And I can understand how it would destroy a movie, because it kind of did that for Narbacular Drop. We didn’t start play-testing until really the last month of our development, and by that point it’s too late to do anything about it. It’s like, “Oh, well, that’s unfortunate.” I think it’s when you start to get user feedback that’s most important. Because we’re in an entertainment industry, and if people are not entertained, then we’re not doing our job.

Emphasis mine.

Congratulations RealTime Worlds (and my mate Colin)

Congratulations to all the crew at RealTime Worlds (especially my mate Colin MacDonald) for their BAFTA awards for all their hard work on Crackdown!

Just warms the cockles of my heart, it really does.

Now you're thinking with Portals...

So a few crazy days ago I bought The Orange Box from my local gaming emporium. I bought it for two simple reasons:

1. I had Half Life 2 on my PC, and my PC decided to get decidedly unreliable. It overheats. Particularly when gaming. So I never finished it. And damnit, I wanted to finish it.

2. I really really really wanted to play Portal. I think it was the trailer (click the link) which ensnared me at first. The combination of sarcastic humor and computer AI entranced me, making me want to get involved. In fact, I figured, this game had the potential to be the funniest videogame since Whiplash (a game which not nearly enough people have played).

A rush to Best Buy, my wallet $60 lighter, and I had it in my grubby little hands. So I fired up Portal.

And I finished it in about 2 and a half hours. (Less, if you believe the save game stats).

Am I pissed at this?

No! Not at all! In fact, I'm rather ecstatically happy about the whole thing. Let me tell you why.

Portal has soul. Not only is it a maddeningly fun puzzle game, but its sense of humor really does carry everything through. And the ending?

I'll just say that the ending of Portal is possibly the best ending of any video game I've played to date. It even has a musical number. In fact, the ending made up for any and all qualms I could possibly have had about it being so short. I just felt so... accomplished and happy at the end.

Portal has to be about the only game I've ever seen which mixes baking, an insane AI and post-apocalyptic dystopia as its plot points. And with music by Jonathan Coulton hidden inside it, I can honestly say that this game has everything. Especially if you have a dark and twisted sense of humor.

So my $60? Well, that bought me 5 (yes, that's five, count 'em) games¹. But I would have spent that money all over again just to play Portal by itself.

That's what I call value for money. I'll post more when I finish Half Life 2.

¹ Well, okay, five is debatable. You get Portal, Team Fortress 2 (an online only multiplayer first person shooter), and Half Life 2 in the box - but Half Life 2 is the original story, plus two follow-up episodes of story goodness. Either way, it's crazy value for money, and possibly the most worthwhile game to come out this year.

F.E.A.R. Demo

Wow... I honestly didn't give this demo the chance it deserved when I first played it.

My girlfriend just got done with the demo. She jumped in several places. And this is a girl who thinks that Saw III is something to drift off to sleep to. (Yes, she's that hardcore about horror movies).

I need to get the full game, I think. It was amazing quite how they incorporated some pretty damn awesome psychological trickery into the gameplay.

Color me totally impressed.

The Suffering - Now on XBOX 360

The Suffering made the XBOX 360 Backwards Compatibility list today! W00t!

It looks gorgeous in 720p with full-screen antialiasing. Awesome!

A bunch of folks at work (Surreal) are very happy today :) Now the only question remains... where's the back-compat for Suffering 2? :)

(other games I'd like to see backwards compatibility for include Advent Rising [the only game I know of which seems to have been developed for the debug kits - not the retail released machines], Whiplash and most importantly, Chronicles of Riddick!)

Separated at birth (by about 24 years)

Nintendo DS:



Nintendo Donkey Kong Game & Watch from 1982:

LOST Recap...

I just realized that people might not be up to speed on exactly what the storyline of LOST is. This might help.

(Mega-Kudos to CapnBob for doing this).

LOST - the ARG...

(If you're wondering what an ARG or "Alternative Reality Game" is, please check out http://www.unfiction.org)

Looks like the TV show LOST is starting up an ARG. The trailhead is the site http://thehansofoundation.org (referred to glancingly in the episode Orientation shown last week).

Entering https:// instead of http:// gives you the text "bigspaceship1". Typing this in takes you to ... well... kind of appropriately what appears to be a numbers site. (http://bigspaceship1.com if you need the link).

This site has been getting weirder and weirder. Latest pic is a mouse sitting on a piece of cheese with a numbers-site radio recording from way back being played behind it.

If you take that pic, and run it through Photoshop (Equalize, then clip the red channel), you get the message "attention all rodents meet at 22:00 local time", along with this map:

Looks like the game is afoot :)

Schizo Sierra

Joe Stratiff has a very interesting take on recent goings on at EA games.

One poster responded to his blog with this comment:

With the Silicon Valley meltdown, EA's apparently gone from bad to worse. Ive never worked there (and never will!), but the sweat shop stories now rival what Ive heard from Sierra Online vets long ago. Insane.

Now, I'd reply to this in the blog itself, but Joe has closed comments (after all, 443 comments each triggering an email, and you have to draw the line somewhere). So, given that I can't reply there, I'll ask here...

So just how long ago was this? I worked for Sierra for 3 years (up until Jan 2002), and I had a great time, with a great salary, and (being the lead) managed to control the working hours so that we scheduled 40 hour work weeks and kept to that with the occasional 2 week crunch. Morale was great, work product was great, and me & my team repeatedly shipped on time and on budget.

Sure, there was the occasional crunch, but I (as lead) tried to bear the brunt of it.

Must have been a different part of Sierra. Either that, or we were a special case and didn't know it. I guess that goes to show what you get if you put together a good match between lead engineer and producer - really good results.

Argh!

Halo 2.

Ending.

Damnit.

Cliffhanger.

Just ... got ... to ... not ... screaaaaaaaammmmmmmmm!!!!!!

Halo 2 Released...

Well, Halo 2 is now out.

That's all I have to say on the matter. Other than that there appears (at first glance) to be over 450 people waiting to pick up their copies at the Redmond Town Center EB Games.

A quick back of the envelope calculation indicates the following:

30 minutes to give copies to 5 batches of 10 people (50 people).

450 people = 9 batches of 50.

So, 9 batches, at 30 minutes a piece means...

They should be done handing them out some time around 5am.

I feel quite ill with a cold right now, so I'm going to bed. No way in hell am I waiting in the cold in that queue. Yikes.

I'll pick my copy up tomorrow. They'd better have it. Not only did I prepay, but my receipt says that it will be held for me for 48 hours after it arrives. Not only that, but I have a saved voicemail on my phone stating that the game will be ready for me tonight at midnight. So alls I'm saying is... it had better be there. Or, in the best of Robocop ways, "There Will Be.... Trouble."

Microsoft Loses Sports Game Division

Looks like Microsoft has finally finished getting rid of their sports games division. Not that I was a big sports games fan to begin with... but still.

Hmmm... at this rate, there aren't going to be many more games companies left in the Seattle
area. Which is a shame.

One of the reasons I liked living in Seattle was the fact that it appeared to have one of the largest concentrations of applications and games software development companies outside of Silicon Valley.

Since the dot com bubble burst, the number of companies up here have dwindled. This is a huge shame; shrink-wrap software is what I love working on. The less companies, the less jobs... and the less opportunity.

At this point, I'd love to set up a company of my own. That, however, takes capital that I don't have. What I do have though is ideas for several games, and several applications - all of which could be potential money makers. Not huge sums of money, but enough to kickstart a small startup if it's run on a tight budget.

Anyone got any ideas on how to get something like that rolling?

Halo 2 Pre-Game Kickoff

Do you like bees?

I love bees.

Back when A.I. was coming out in theatres, there was a pre-movie game. Call it "The Beast" if you will. I was on CloudMakers, and participated in the fun.

Now the game is back. And this time, it's related to Halo 2 (as you can see by the rabbit-hole entryway to the game in the Halo 2 trailer - the URL www.xbox.com flashes up as www.ilovebees.com for a short moment).

I'm playing. Are you? Join the fun at www.unfiction.com - and go to the Haunted Apiary section.

 

Rest in Peace, Sierra

Well, it looks like Sierra has gone the way of the dodo. It now lives on in brand-form only.

That's a shame. Sierra was easily the best company I've worked for to date. (Not that I dislike my current place, but Sierra had more resources and was working more in the area that I'd consider my core interest). I made some of my closest friends at that company. And I had a lot of fun.

Sure, it's not exactly unexpected that this happened. For example, during the last two rounds of layoffs they got rid of a lot of people who were prime-movers and producers - the engines behind the machine, if you will. Losing your top performers is certainly not a smart move if you want to stay in business. But they did - and now look where we are.

I'll miss you, Sierra. May you rest in peace.

(I'm just hoping that this isn't the death knell of the rest of the Seattle area games industry... what with Zombie games laying off people, Microsoft ditching their sports games... there certainly doesn't look like much you can do other than set up your own company any more around here. Which would be good if games weren't so expensive to produce if you want them to sell).

Halo 2 - E3 2k4

Oh. My. God.

Halo 2 Movies @ TeamXBOX

I love this time of the year. Spring is in the air. Redmond is soggy. And E3 happens in LA.

Next year, I'm there. But in the mean time.

Oh. My. God. I. Want. Halo. 2. Now.

(But I'll have to wait until November 9th)