What is SunPath Playing?

Holiday 2010 Board Games

2011-01-03T10:17:00.001-08:00

The beginning of a post about board games on the break - this email originally sent to MJ co-workers:

1000 Blank White Cards

- Basically you make cards and then you play with them. Each person makes 10 cards to start, and you throw in some blank cards which you can make and play on your turn.

- We played this with 2 other friends and it was quite fun. It really shows the random creativity of the group (and it’s free!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_Blank_White_Cards

1960: The Making of the President

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/27708/1960-the-making-of-the-president

This is the game I just babbled about to Jonathan, Marc, and Matthew. 2 player game where Nixon and Kennedy battle it out (again!) More fun than it sounds!

D&D: Castle Ravenloft

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/59946/dungeons-dragons-castle-ravenloft-board-game

This is a co-op D&D board game but way less complex than it looks or sounds. J 1-5 players.

From online reports it looks like most people are playing it either as couples or with their kids.

Space Hulk: Death Angel (card game)

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71721/space-hulk-death-angel-the-card-game

Co-op card game which is basically like playing Halo or watching Alien. Each player gets a team of 2 fighters who work together to defend their ship from hordes of aliens!

Again, sounds more complicated than it is.

Paste's Best Casual Games of 2010

2010-12-27T11:59:00.000-08:00

It is somewhat sad that the only "traditional" download game (of the ilk made by Big Fish, PlayFirst, etc here) - is maybe Puzzle Agent.

No Ravenhearst, etc.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2010/12/the-10-best-casual-games-of-2010.html

Of these I have played
#9 - Ninjatown Trees of Doom

#7 - Cityville

#6 - GameDevStory

#5 - Trainyard

#3 - Nelson Tethers, Puzzle Agent (note this was also on Alex Ahlund's top 40 iPhone apps)

I want to play the other 5 also. Of these 5 I have played, Ninjatown and Cityville are the two i have returned to the most.

Realities and Red Herrings: Game Developer's Guide to Profitability

2010-10-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

http://casualconnect.org/content/Seattle/2010/realitiesandredherringsseattle10.html
Good talk from Sean Clark of Big Fish Games, who I've met in meetings at PlayFirst.
Watching the talk today, did not see it in Seattle...

- he was working on a text-based RPG at Playdom?
- also interesting that he left Playdom to go back to Big Fish
- different routes to the top of the mountain...like Ed Viesturs
- what's the best way to use the limited resources that I have?
- how to filter out the noise and get the signal?
- audience: developers, especially indie developers

Sean Clark is the Executive Producer for Casual Downloads at Big Fish Games. Prior to Big Fish Games, Sean has been a Project Director at LucasArts Entertainment Company, a Studio Director at EA/Pogo and an Executive Producer at Playdom. During his more than 20 years experience in the game industry, Sean has been involved in all aspects of game development and distribution, from writing and designing to directing and producing. Additionally, Sean has also served on the studio management and business sides of Core/Retail, Casual and Social gaming on platforms ranging from PC to Console and handheld to browser-based games.

Browser Tech Smackdown - Casual Connect

2010-10-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

A panel that I did not attend but am listening to it now:
http://casualconnect.org/content/Seattle/2010/browsertechsmackdownseattle10.html

The web game industry has changed tremendously in the last 5 years. Unfortunately the technology behind it has not evolved as quickly.
Will the next 5 years be different? Will Flash continue to dominate, or will there be a changing of the guard? Is 3D the killer feature, or is there something else that could disrupt the status quo.

Executive Summary:
Not sure if they really answered these questions - there was no clear winner of the smackdown, other than Kongregate being open to the open community of games delivered with all these browser techs.
Unity comes across as being one of the tech engines that makes the most sense, after watching this panel.
Moderated by Jim Greer, Kongregate
Nice intro - "I'm not an expert, but I know some experts."
In intro, ask each panelist to throw out one controversial opinion to get the panel started.
He also asked on Rededit to get questions for the panel! Nice!

Crossplatform desktop/mobile - Unity can do this, David Helgasson points out.

Business model/commerce features - Mark De Loura mentions the Web store for Chrome.

Danielle of Adobe points out that Flash does support controllers. David points out that Unity does too.

What about a Flash App Store?
Offer commerce services or cloud-based services?
No - we don't want to compete with our users - companies using Flash are already delivering this.

Q: Why is it so much more complicated to make Unity games than Flash? (another questioner expressed the opposite opinion, asking what kind of cake the engineer wants who developed the scripting system for Unity).
Jim Greer calls out the visual style of Flash as a benefit.
David H points out that a lot of people actually find Unity easier to use than Flash. Laying out the game in a 3D space can be more intuitive.

Also, many high end web games are developed in 3D and then baked down... (that's true for Willows!)
So it's easier to use Unity if you are authoring in 3D in the first place.
(Danielle never got to respond from Adobe...)

Questioner asks Paul from Microsoft about how to optimize large Javascript applications
Basically his answer was, we will work with the developer community and the standards bodies to evolve the standards.

Flash player question - being able to turn off sound globally should be a feature
Asked Danielle - she said it never came up at a developer event she went to.
Jim Greer says that on Kongregate you go down half a point if you don't have a mute button in your game.
It sounds like the whole panel thinks that the browser should have a mute button!
Much discussion about watching or doing something in the browser and having to re-find the mute button in each app or tab.

But there's so many layers - the OS, the game, the tab, the panel basically thinks this must be why it's not a browser feature yet.

Q from Audience:
Why would I want to develop in HTML 5 if anyone can just click "view source" and steal my code?
Mark De Loura says - you have to use obfuscators now if you are coding in Javascript to hide it from those who use "View Source" but if you're a crafty engineer there are ways to figure it out...that's true of DRM in general, people can always figure it out.
Then again, the web always has meant openness and being able to view source, but if you spend millions of dollars on a game or app, certainly don't want someone else to view it.
(Note that "View Source" is how I learned how to code in HTML 1.0 back in 1994, along with Stanford's web tutorials.)

Q on Business Model
Kongregate is 50%/50% virtual goods and ads now, Jim Greer says.
Q: What are you going to do about the fact that hardcore gamers hate virtual goods?
They don't care about cosmetic upgrades, they hate paid players having advantages, and they don't respond to ads because they block them.

A: Unity says, we don't have a specific feature for the business model, you can implement whatever you want...
Do people not buy things in the web browser because you can't? Or because you don't want to?

Kongregate does upgradable single-player experience and
natively social MMO type experience.
The natively social game gets more traction in virtual goods and making more money...

But a lot of people don't want to play games online! They want to play alone. The panel seems concerned to leave behind the single player immersive experience.

Mark De Loura points out the different ways of paying for content:
Example - Watching 24. You can buy the DVD, you can watch it online, you can watch it on hulu with ads.
He doesn't want games to be delivered in only one way.

Jim Greer - fear that we are cannibalizing some of the great gaming experiences.
It's hard to justify building a high budget game if you are also throwing the content out for free with virtual goods.

David H of Unity says - this might change as the companies get better at delivering this content for free and properly monetizing their users. (ie, there is hope for free to play).

Q: What's the role of a portal in the next 5 years?
Jim Greer: We see ourselves as being all about a community of players.
They come to us because they like great games, we deliver them great games.
We deliver achievements, their progress is tracked.
"All my friends are going to play with me."
Pogo, WoW, and Kongregate all have succeeded this way.
We succeed best in an open environment.
He is very excited to see C++, Unity, fast streaming html 5 games, all on our service.
In the wrapup I realize that this panel was a great idea as positioning for Kongregate as one of the big customers for all these games.

Free Realms, SOE

2010-10-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

Play Free Realms again to get new update.

* Laralyn McWilliams interview on MMOgamer at the Launch of Free Realms
" It’s just been really fascinating for us as a team to watch and really exciting because for a long while we were the sort of little game nobody had heard of.

We were SOE’s small project, and so it’s really great for us to finally get it done and get it out in front of players and then have players enjoy it as much as they are."

" While right now casual games are on the upswing, they’re going to hit a certain peak and stay at that peak, and the people are going to say, you know, “I want something deeper.”

* Interview with Laralyn at G.I.R.L talk

SOE's Casual "MMO"s - Clone Wars Adventures

2010-09-25T07:50:00.001-07:00

Clone Wars Adventures
I completely forgot about this game until seeing this article, stating that it has 1 million users only 1 week after launch!

Trying it out now. The 1 million users are receiving Golden Mouse Droids this weekend. It's free to play. Competes right now for my thoughts with Lord of the Rings Online, also free to play, and Knights of the Old Republic, 2003 award winning RPG from Bioware, which is almost free to play at $2.99 on Steam!

Very quick registration and avatar picking...

Takes 35 MB to download the SOE installer - I assume this is the same installer used for Free Realms...

Nice - goes directly into opening cutscene, which popped up when I was doing something else in the background.

I am welcomed directly by YODA!
To a briefing with Mace Windu, Anakin, etc. I am a Padawan Learner!
They need my help in the fight. There is much to learn, etc etc.

At one point the pace of the conversation slows a LOT when Mace Windu starts talking about earning credits...
and buying stuff... in the store...

Mace Windu looks at me meaningfully as he says this.

Finally, call to play "take this lightsaber, it's yours now!"
A real lightsaber of my very own. Wow, in KOTOR I could not get this right away.

Then I transition to the game lounge. I expected to see a character beckoning me to click on them, but I feel kind of lost.

It turns out that you can launch mini-games by walking around the ship and launching them, but it's a lot easier to just click on the Games button in the HUD and choose one.
Similar to the currently available version of Free Realms, except there is some exploration in Free Realms. There's no real narrative progression, or "quests" which I think is because of what they found out when they did the first Free Realms.

Very well done art and theme, voice acting, sound effects all hit the quality bar!

In each mini-game, you play through a series of levels, sometimes against other characters. In many of them, the medium and hard levels are only open to Jedi Members (those who have paid for monthly membership with Station Cash or hard $).

I played the below - all pretty standard fare where it comes to mini games, but thematically making sense:
- lightsaber battle - level 1 is Obi Wan, you must hit arrow keys quickly in the right sequence. I beat Obi Wan but 2nd level was against Anakin's Padawan learner, and I blame the computer speed as I tried twice but couldn't beat her fast enough.
- typing game - type the right letters as they fall down the screen, boss fight is words (this was obviously too easy at easy level, which was the only level I could play without becoming a Jedi)
- star speeder - flying forward on rails, steering and shooting at enemy ships
- blaster training - shooting range - droids pop up and you shoot them.

I guess I wish that it had more of a narrative pull to link the games together.

If I earn X credits, do I get rewarded again by Yoda and the Jedi Council who welcomed me?
Is there the semblance of a metastructure?

Here are links about Clone Wars.

* Gamasutra article about Clone Wars
* Interview with Producer Todd Carson of Clone Wars (Todd's presentation is super excited!)
* Laralyn McWilliams interview on MMOgamer at the Launch of Free Realms
" It’s just been really fascinating for us as a team to watch and really exciting because for a long while we were the sort of little game nobody had heard of.

We were SOE’s small project, and so it’s really great for us to finally get it done and get it out in front of players and then have players enjoy it as much as they are."

" While right now casual games are on the upswing, they’re going to hit a certain peak and stay at that peak, and the people are going to say, you know, “I want something deeper.”

* Interview with Laralyn at G.I.R.L talk

Dragon Quest 9: Crossing to Casual?

2010-07-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

I fell in love with Dragon Quest 4 years ago when my friend Adam told me that this cute blue Hershey's Kiss thing was actually a monster that you fight in the game! Now I can make a whole slime outfit for my warrior (named after my husband Dave)

However, I had a hard time finishing Dragon Quest 8, on the PS2. Random battles made the experience way too slow, and not rewarding enough. Too much grinding, it was not possible to get even the first success in the first dungeon without grinding back and forth on the low-level monsters.

Also I wished it was on the DS so I could play where I play most other long RPGs, on my commute to work! I did buy and finish DQ4 on the DS.

But I have been looking forward to a new DS DQ for a while. Enter DQ9: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, which I bought on launch day, July 11.

The developers (Yuji Horii, creator of the series; Level 5/Square Enix, the developers; and publisher, Nintendo) seem to be trying quite hard to make this game more palatable for at least 3 "new" audiences, and I think they have succeeded:

Americans (Dragon Quest/Warrior just not very popular here in US but is HUGE in Japan. My friend Andrew who is a Pokefan, had never heard of DQ).
Women (see link to Iwata Asks interviews on my earlier blog post - addition of char customization, they think has helped this. Game is more popular with Japanese women than the previous titles too). They've also focused on several other "casual" features that we focus on to improve conversion for our games at PlayFirst (list below)
Kids - The series is 25 years old so many of the original fans are now parents and teaching their kids about Dragon Quest. Horii-san said in the Iwata Asks interview, that they wanted the local multiplayer feature so that parents could play directly with their kids and teach them about the game together.

Here are some of the specific "casual" features that I think contribute to DQ9's improvements over at least DQ8, if not the entire series. Also, I know that overall the marketing of the game is focused on the new multiplayer features, but here in the US I think that people will fall in love the most with single player first and then use that fandom to suck others into the multiplayer.

Customization, Metastructure (with clear goals) and Rewards.

CROSS-OVER TO CASUAL

1. Customization (Engagement): In the Iwata Asks interview, Horii-san pointed out that DQ9 is more popular with Japanese women at least, than the other series. They think this is because of the ability for "fashion" that the customization affords.

I think it goes deeper than that for a lot of people, not just women. There's also a lot of creativity when you create, name, and outfit each character, instead of having them pop up into your party as they appear in the story. In several reviews, these customized characters are called out as a drawback because it makes the game story fluffier, no connection to your characters. This didn't bother me as much as I thought it would -- the game story is about "helping" in game characters, and the in-game characters are just as rewarding to me as the party members who join up in other DQ games.

I really enjoyed making a little party of "me", husband, two friends we like, and giving them jobs/clothes that match real-world personalities somewhat.

Storytelling - There is this awesome thread on Gamespot (and another on IGN Gamefaqs) where people have made up RPG stories for their parties. The appeal of this goes back to The Sims and all the stories posted on their community pages.

2. Metastructure and Clear Goals: In other DQ games (and other RPGs) I often refer to a walkthrough to figure out what to do next.

In DQ9, from the beginning, the player doesn't have much confusion, but yet still a sense of exploration. The game opens with two villagers walking along a path - they are beset by monsters. You're watching from the heavens with a senior Celestrian, and drop down to help, (before this you customize your character quickly and name him/her).

Presto - First Battle! Either player is sucked into gameplay, or not, but no long opening cutscene, less risk of boredom. (This opening sequence is almost set up with a free trial in mind, I wonder if they are thinking ahead, to download distribution in the future).

The villagers thank you by name afterward, since they know they have a new Guardian (you!).

As the game goes on, players have a system of quests, and a fairy named Stella who follows the player around, in addition to the overarching story goal (helping people, collecting fyggs, with eventual goal to return to your heavenly realm, regain your wings).

In the beginning of the game, Stella is constantly popping out and prompting the player where to go next. She also appears on the Battle Records menu, and presents you with rewards as you play (see below).

This is kind of like Navi in Zelda, but somehow not annoying. Also, to advance the storyline, there is a dependable pattern which may prove comforting to casual players -

1. enter village - walk around entire village and talk to everyone, figure out what's going on

2. fight around the village to level up (but not needed for too long) - buy new cool stuff in village

3. go to nearby dungeon to solve whatever problem villagers have.

4. talk around village after return and do other random quests.

If players do these steps, the story is not confusing or feeling like it's off-putting or "too hardcore".

I have been playing for about 30 hours now (which includes time the DS has been sleeping) and have only looked stuff up on a FAQ ONCE! It all seems to make more logical sense. The maps are also small enough so you don't get lost, but large enough to keep a sense of wonder and exploration as you wander.

Also, at least in the beginning part of the game, it seemed like each minor sub-goal could be completed in about an hour (ie, my BART commute).

3. Frequent Rewards:

Top here is that gameplay and "grinding" does not get tedious because you can run around the random battles and avoid them, if high level enough. This was one of the things that soured me on DQ8. Also adds to the customization - if I want to fight a lot of slimes, I'll go choose them!

Leveling up and buying new stuff is continually rewarding. The new equipment available never beefs you up by more than 5-10 points in a stat, but it's enough to make you feel like you're improving. Making new items with alchemy after finding all the ingredients is also fun and not too confusing (you can find out in the item lists and monster lists where items are dropped, and then go find them, without a FAQ).

In the Battle Records, you also get accolades for stuff like achieving 500 victories, defeating a certain percentage of monsters, getting new skills, etc.

It also tracks the wardrobe items found, regular items, alchemy recipes, and your quests.

Horii-san said that he admires Elder Scrolls: Oblivion quite a bit, and the quest system seems somewhat drawn from that. The quests are sometimes very specific but you get good gear from them, and they help fill out the fantasy that you are a celestial, here to help in the world.

Traveling is not a pain because the main character learns Zoom very early and can jump around to any town they've seen.

Also the basic story mode is nicely ramped. The hardcore say it is too easy. I just played my first treasure map dungeon and got trounced by Equinox, the boss horse at the end.

That boss apparently is supposed to be fought around level 30 or 40. There are tons of treasure maps to find and trade - this is apparently the difficulty coming in at the end of the story. Story still challenging but not too hard, so that "almost anyone" can play through and have fun.

Laura Shigihara's "Girls in the Video Game Industry" series

2010-07-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

http://shigi.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/girls-in-the-video-game-industry-1-tammy-tsuyuki/

for reference.

Dragon Quest 9

2010-07-11T17:32:00.000-07:00

Iwata Asks about Dragon Quest 9
Currently listening to these 10 interviews with Yuji Horii (designer of the Dragon Quest series) Satoru Iwata (Pres, Nintendo), and Ryutaro Ichimura (Producer, Square Enix).

Focus seems to be to explain and promote Dragon Quest in general and especially this latest game, for the American/Western audience.

They point out that in Japan, they are seeing a lot more women playing DQ9 for the first time, they attribute this to the character customization feature.

A "Patty's Pub" spontaneously opened in Akhihabra.

"It has become a social phenomenon." - Treasure Maps are randomly generated and people share them. One person found an amazingly good map and then they started sharing it in public - for example, at the Akhihabra pub. Kids asking their dads to take their DS with them when they go on business trips in other cities, for the Tag Mode sharing.

Have played the first hour or so of the game and it is so far much better than DQ8 for me. Progression in the early town is faster, it's more rewarding to have the multiple goals of helping people, and I really appreciate being able to choose from my random battles.

I can run back from an early dungeon/boss area to the town, and completely bypass all the slimes and other small fry that will only give me 1 exp point each. In DQ8, I had to bump into all of them.

In one segment, they said that they wanted parents to be able to play with their kids, go in and fight monsters that might be scary, etc. They also call out girlfriends playing the game only to play with their boyfriends. What about girlfriends pushing boyfriends to play?

Iwata points out that for turn-based games like this, the skill and reflexes are not as big of an issue. Horii adds, "Anyone can play through it if they give it a chance".

Siliconera article.

Emily Short Takes on Love and Death: Bitten

2010-06-30T19:40:00.000-07:00

Just documenting Emily's latest post on GameSetWatch on one of our games - now Love and Death: Bitten.

In general I agree with her - although the story of this game, quite frankly, is what it is for the kind of game it is - as she points out before going into a more discoursive critical review of the narrative!
We know most of our audience is not Emily Short (but we should probably be trying to hit our narrative, story and characters to hook her in also). It's very hard to get them to read.

Interesting quotes on the elements that do work:

I am not a great fan of hidden object gameplay. I played Love and Death: Bitten for two reasons: it was getting strong reviews as a casual game with a lot of story content, and it also contains a number of other types of puzzle.

The reviews don't lie: if we set aside the essential implausibility that the protagonists stop at the most inopportune times to search for trinkets, this is a pretty decent story/gameplay mesh for a hidden object game.

She also appreciated our attempts to tell the story via the hidden object scenes and the "thoughts" of the characters when the player clicks on items:

After the first act, the hidden object experience is used to unveil Damon's past and the characters' different attitudes towards that past, rather than to set up their overall abilities. Much of the action is set in the castle where he lives: the hidden object screens are full of memories when he manipulates them, and discovery when Victoria does. The list of objects to find in a given scene gives some hint about what the viewpoint character might be thinking, even when he or she offers no explicit comment.

Victoria, for instance, investigating Damon's study, finds an assortment of objects that point at his talents and musical abilities. Damon, on the other hand, notices the tokens given to him by previous lovers, and cast-off bottles of wine -- hints at a dissolute lifestyle. The game does not go into this in any explicit detail, but perhaps we can judge from this that Victoria sees Damon more favorably than he sees himself. In any case, it's a relatively deft and thoughtful use of this play style.

Finally, in one scene, the player is required to combine the hidden objects into a tableau that tells the full story of Damon's background. It's contrived, but it does work; it gives the backstory of how Damon became what he is, and connects several previously unexplained pieces of evidence.

On the flip side:
"There is not a moment of human truth from one end to the other."

See also her previous Homer in Silicon posts on other PF games:
* Chocolatier: Decadence by Design and also Chocolatier 2 (and Choc 1, linked in the Choc link). She also played The Great Chocolate Chase.
* DinerTown Tycoon - "Unfortunately, the gameplay of DinerTown Tycoon is still fairly unadventurous; it is merely borrowing from a different genre than Diner Dash. There is little in the play of DinerTown Tycoon that one can't find in the deeply bland and profoundly unexceptional Cinema Tycoon, Cinema Tycoon 2, Cinema Tycoon Gold, and for all I know Cinema Tycoon Platinum Studded with Diamonds XXVII. "

It may sound as though I entirely despised the game, but I didn't; I played the whole thing through and I wasn't hating it while I did so. The whole Diner Dash series is designed, tested, and manufactured by people who know what they are doing. It's just that what they're doing is not always what I would call "game design."

* Passport to Perfume - she liked it, kind of. She liked making the perfume.

* Wandering Willows - "amiable but undemanding" (do we want our games to be "demanding"?)
One of the most entertaining quotes here:
(I found myself fleetingly wondering about the slave-labor hierarchy of this society, since the long-term inhabitants mostly rely on the newcomer to provide them with food and clothing, while the newcomer in turn manipulates the cunning but speechless animals into doing all the really hard work. But I am fairly certain the designers did not intend me to think about any such thing.)
mwa ha ha, perhaps Dan DID intend us to think about slave-labor!

* Emerald City Confidential

* Omnibus post about many casual games including DD:HH and Wedding Dash: Having played the original Diner Dash to exhaustion, she's not excited about either one (and probably by extension the WD sequels). Also oddly enough she didn't like Cooking Dash either.

Not sure if she has ever talked about Dream Chronicles.

LifeQuest from BFG

2010-05-06T19:05:00.000-07:00

Also I am playing LifeQuest which is #1 on BFG right now and is a Big Fish Studios game.
(with an interesting very personal Special Thanks in the credits - apparently it is dedicated to the mom of one of the designers).

Very appropriate for Mother's Day.

Very addictive.

PuzzleBots

2010-05-06T13:55:00.001-07:00

OMG. The demo for Puzzle Bots (and the game itself) is very very good.

Very quick thoughts
- lasted close to an hour (good)
- I felt engaged the whole time - just the right amount of challenge - had to click HINT twice (two separate questions) and hint was very logical, provoked a "duh!" moment (Oh, I would have got that...)
- character and story development very good. Zander and Yuriko as a very cute almost couple (and story hints at a triangle with a new scientist being hired into lab - Zander thinks she's cute).
- I always love the theme of small things (the robots) in a big world, and seeing the impact of what I do while controlling the robots (for example the coffee maker "spaceship" that launches the 2 robots across the break room).

Casual Connect Leadership and Development Panel!

2010-04-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

Here’s the spiel that got approved by the Women in Games IGDA group:

What:

http://archives.igda.org/women/archives/2010/03/call_for_propos.html

When & Where:

Monday, 7/19, in Seattle at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel.

Link: the Leadership & Professional Development Forum.

This debut pre-Casual Connect conference was a big hit last year!

My pitch:

Successful Female Game Devs Speak: It Pays to Hire Women in Games

Yes, we do need more women in the game industry! We need to make sure girls and women are aware of the opportunities, and make sure employers are aware of the benefits.

Q: What do you get when you hire women to develop games?

A: Successful, fun games that sell! Come hear women from different experience levels, companies, and genres share their experiences in the game industry, plus the learnings and successful games that resulted.

For Panelists - let's go a bit deeper than the "hey we're women in the game industry!"

What issues can we really dig into, for an audience of managers/employers/execs in casual games (many of whom statistically at this conference are male).

Other Panelists:

Maryann Klingman, Senior Producer, PlayFirst.

Maryann’s career spans 17 years and over 40 titles: working in educational software as an Executive Producer and now directing the production of casual downloadable games published by PlayFirst. She is a strong mentor and role model and inspirational team builder.

Because of Maryann’s example, her daughter, Theresa Duringer, grew up inspired by her mother’s success in the game industry. Theresa now works at Electronic Arts as a Community Manager on Spore, among other titles.

Prof. Carrie Heeter, Michigan State University. (tele-teaches from San Francisco).

Carrie Heeter is a frequent speaker at game design conferences. Her current game design and research includes brain games, deliberative decision games, and adaptive learning games. She has been designing interactive media since 1990, winning more than 50 awards. She co-founded the Serious Game Design MA track at Michigan State University and is a PI in the GEL (Games 4 Entertainment and Learning) Lab. Heeter is PI on numerous National Science Foundation grants to study gender and gaming and play style and learning. She is co-editor, with Kafai, Denner, and Sun, of the book Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender, Games and Computing. She is creator and editor in chief of http://investigaming.com , a gateway to research on gender, gaming and computing for game industry professionals and academics.

Karen Clark, Senior Project Manager, World Golf Tour

Karen is an industry veteran and expert in Agile project management: she’s worked at Bioware on Dragon Age Origins; at EA on Online Features including for Mass Effect 2, as well at Linden Lab, Garage Games, and more. She also co-founded the GameMentorOnline site and is the chair of the Women in Games International Mentoring Program. http://www.gamementoronline.org/

Tentative or unconfirmed

Brenda Brathwaite
Jane Jensen (Kenny introduced us this week, she has not yet responded)
Amanda Fitch (who founded and runs her own game dev company, Amaranth Games. Aveyond series.) Just asked her today 4/29 on LinkedIn.
Erin Robinson (designer/developer of the new adventure game Puzzle Bots. Won Game Design Challenge at GDC 2009. Co-Host of IGF Awards at GDC 2010). Emailing her now 4/29

Moderator:

Solveig Pederson Zarubin, Producer, PlayFirst

Over 12 years in the game industry, from educational software to The Sims 2, to casual games, Solveig enjoys bringing talented people together and guiding them to a finished, high quality game. Or in this case, a panel! Most recently, Solveig has been a Producer at PlayFirst, as lead producer on Diner Dash: Hometown Hero, Wandering Willows and Love and Death: Bitten. In spring 2006 after the Women in Games conference, Solveig also co-founded a small lunch group for women in the game industry, which has now lasted for four years of monthly lunches and networking!

Here’s my LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/solveigpederson

Bitten Launch!

2010-04-13T23:21:00.000-07:00

The game I have been working on with a large number of talented people, for over a year, finally launched today to the public!

A bit jaw-dropping that it looks like it will be potentially quite successful commercially, at least the most financially successful game I have worked on at PlayFirst. A bit hard to get my mind around it.

Recently on 24, the character Chloe O'Brien said, "I don't do praise well."
I often feel the same.
Often it's much harder for me to deal with success or impending success -- than to just buckle down and deal with a crisis or a problem. I spent most of the day working on other projects ...and not really being able to sit and let the potential success soak in...other than sneaking peeks at the forum postings!

It's been a few weeks since we GM'ed the game. I have been playing the game again back and forth on BART commuting today, and I can honestly say that I still like to play it! Even the hidden object scenes which are my least favorite as a player, still draw me in. This project was full of emotion for almost everyone on the team, we all cared pretty deeply about it.

David Ryan Paul, the first lead artist on the project, wrote this blog post which has links to all the artists involved except for:
Jeff Troupe, Alt A Games, and Xing Xing Digital Corporation.
We had talented designers - Patrick, Helen, Dana...
Once again I was lucky enough to work with the "Ninja-neer" - Jim.
And Paul, who jumped in to learn the engine in the middle and got us through several major changes (I don't have a nickname yet for Paul. "Remember Sweden!")
Plus as a bonus, Peter, "Winston Wolf", and the awesome senior production of Maryann (who just won a "greenlight Oscar" award today).

Here's the PlayFirst blog post I wrote as the Producer interview...there are tons more Bitten posts on the PlayFirst blog - character diaries, the "focus hat" video made by Mike which stars Chuck and Helen (and I wave my arms around while wearing a werewolf hat).
Also the game trailer (I do like the animation that Big Fish has on their landing page as well).
Plus character profiles, and soon also concept art.

I was so happy to see the positive posts in the forums today and reviews. Early positive word from trusted fans and players is so important...and we are very thankful for it. Many people posting later in the day said that their decision was almost made for them after seeing these posts. I also really love this feeling of connectedness with the fans.
It's like playing Diner Dash:Hometown Hero live with Heather89 the moment that we turned on the multiplayer server for the public almost 3 years ago. Or watching the small but dedicated fan base for Wandering Willows get sucked into the game.

One example from the Big Fish forums: "Poodlebear" posted at 1:41 am on 4/13 - so they had downloaded as soon as possible since the game went live at midnight on 4/13
"Loving this so far - 40 minutes into the demo."
It *is* a very dark, and adult, story and no doubt some players will have issues with that, but not meeee! Love me some vampire hotness.
Buying! Gently Poodlebear Approved given I've only played 40 minutes... "
(I was briefly suspicious that this could be another team member, but Poodlebear's account has been active since 2007 and s/he has written thousands of posts!)

At 3:52 am Poodlebear had played a couple more hours and believes he/she is about halfway through: "Unless something really wacky occurs I can now fully Poodlebear Approve!"

Brenda Brathwaite wrote a post on "Moments to Gold" which is probably way more emotional than I can get about this game, but what resonates for me is this emotional feeling at the end of a big project:

Here it is...we made this! We hope you like it!
We (most of us) still like to play it even after working on it for months!

Let's Play: Blackwell Legacy LP walkthrough

2010-03-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

Let's Play LP walkthrough of the Blackwell series from Wadjet Eye (for future reference and entertainment purposes).

Also to mask the fact that I have not played through all 3 games yet, when talking to Dave Gilbert. :-)

Fwd: Future of connected games

2010-03-14T21:22:00.003-07:00

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

From: Solveig Zarubin <solveigp@gmail.com>
Date: March 14, 2010 9:05:41 PM PDT
To: "solveigp@gmail.com" <solveigp@gmail.com>
Subject: Future of connected games

Future of connected games panel

SteamPlay
People do not want to be a pc or apple player of a game.
They want to be a fan of a game.
Want to play at home on pc and connected.
Pc and mac versions at once

Facebook has not made it easy to present different sides of a person.
Notifications - all these different people - I don't want to spam them all with the notice a turnip just blossomed

Compare control over xbox and pc
Bioware
Uses telemetry across all the platforms
See social.bioware.com

Portal guy - valve
pc is an open platform- can ship updates

Beta requirements are diff for connected games - you make changes in public for all to see
min from nexon
We really gotta get people in, it is part of the design process
We make mistakes and fix them on the fly

Zynga guy
Ngai asks - I have heard that games ship with 30 percent cimplete
What does that even mean?
There has been a team on farmville for months after 5 week start

Min does not know what 30 percent complete is
They have games that have been out for 10 years - are they done now?

Ngai - do you think of "old content" differently ?
Old content is new content to new player

Zynga guy
Look at the new user experience and make sure it is not too overwhelming for the new player
Wow must have that issue too

Blizzard guy
New exp pack out
We get better at making content
But the people who benefit are the people who have gone thru he old content laready
All the new players are mostly casual
New exp - looks at the whole content from level 1 to 6o and makes better

Ngai asks abor mass effect 2 - casual audience coming in at lower price?
Bioware - we also add expansions, etc
Story features for kotor
Development philosophy as a service.
Continuous dev process

What is the smallest unit of willows

Connected gaming future is not one that can be built with less people
Can the industry survive it's connected future?

Easier to be smaller now
Don't have to ship to gold master to get space on the retail shelf
Everybody can do it

Look at lifetime revenue per user
Games as a service
Change tw metrics used to measure success - some are the metrics used in social games or on steam.

(why would anyone use playground now)

Min talks on korea
Pc cages function as a hub for players

Don't be binary
Give some away, sell some ..
Dlc is what used to be an expansion pack

Zynga

New content and features for retention and revenue
Revenue not necessarily the MOST important.
Build cimmunity by giving away content which builds revenue eventually

Bioware giuy
Can't replace a really creative person

Escapist question
Asking about arg
Valve game team came up with it
The people making it saying "I really know my audience and this will work"

Battle.net- are they going to aupport 3rd party?

We are not just game creators
We are entertainment creators

Min - you are creating another relationship with the user.
People are not going to think about your game as much but they will think about the other people they are playing the game with.

If you are a fan of your game - make cool shit that people will want - that's why we made action figures.

Sent from my iPhone

Indie Summit Keynote: Randy Smith, Spider

2010-03-14T21:22:00.001-07:00

Here is a long writeup on this talk from "mittens" - aka Trent Polack.

My Notes:
Basically, as Trent said, he is calling out the importance of:
* depth
* immediacy

I was glad to see that Trent and I were both kind of surprised to see the amount of time spent discussing all the case studies.
And also giving his blunt opinions of the other games.

My notes:

What does it mean to be indie?
Does not mean bad design

More powerful indie - better design

Canabalt
Flight control
- high level of engagement without reading rules

Discusses affordances
- stuff you can do
- large impact on the game state
- weaker - jump in place
- stronger - jump between things without dying
- mimal effort to experie

Crayon physics deluxe
Scribblenauts

Social games can learn from virtual worlds

2010-03-14T21:18:00.001-07:00

What social games can learn from virtual worlds
Hangout games guy
Decided not to go to the indie game marketing one.

People who invite fewer people over a period of time are more effective.

Importance of retention increasing

How do virtual worlds retain their players
Player investment
-persistence
-creativity
Deep content
Fresh content
Service
Find ways to spend more on service vecause it pays off hugely
Concurrency
- community events, hosted, emergent
- most compelling - find ways for concurrency - fb is now so
asynchronous.
Enough content to allow players to interact - can't make content for
years
- the game is the icebreaker that forms community amongst the players.

Community

Monetization -
Retail -grandma
Subscription - tie to virtual world

Need a diversity of reasons to pay in order to monetize.

Hybrid
Cost of acquisition and scale of social
Long term retention of virtual world.l

Hangout has a mini game that you play when friends are not here

It is a pain to be embedded in facebook - they are planning to move
away from facebook eventually - connect to fb for the social graph but
not be in facebook as soon as the market will support

Amortize customer service across all the none - paying users
100 people paid for by 5 paying users

Sent from my iPhone

Tiger Style Talk

2010-03-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

Sent from my iPhone

GDC 2010: backwards order, Jim Munroe

2010-03-13T19:41:00.000-08:00

Chris (aka @savetherobot) introduced me to Jim Munroe at GDC lunch today. He was really gracious in talking to me after Chris's departure and we walked over to the GDC Rant session together.

Here is a link to Chris's AV Club article re: Everybody Dies, Jim's award-winning interactive fiction.

Here is some reverse fandom, because like everyone else I have met at GDC, especially the people I met through Chris, I didn't realize how cool Jim was on meeting and chatting.

Even before I have seen anything that I should already know about, here's some interesting things that we connected on in person:
- on the basic business side, he is interested in making a point and click adventure game and so I tried to promote PlayGround SDK and PlayFirst in general. I hope he will pitch something to us. Maybe something even cooler than a straight download game.
- he is involved with a coalition of projects and people in support of Toronto's videogame communities called the Hand Eye Society (and is inspiring me to get involved in or start something similar here)
- I realized that I like creating communities also but I don't make the time to do it myself.
- he knows who Pat Murphy is
- he asked me if I had ever been to WisCon! (and has been there in the past and really liked it).

Here's the stuff that I was supposed to already know...
- http://nomediakings.org/about - short list
- 5 books after leaving Harper Collins, the most recent one a post-Rapture graphic novel called Therefore Repent! (he gave me a copy!)
Made this game which is awesome, as well as a text based social sim based on GDC 2009.
Everybody Dies (2008) [play it]
It starts with a metalhead, Graham, realizing that throwing that shopping cart over the bridge was not the great idea he thought it was. Even if it did get him out of washroom duty at Cost Cutters. Windows, Mac, Linux.

- also is a science fiction novelist
- and comic writer
- and movie maker (just one: My Trip to Liberty City (2003, 9 minutes) [watch it]
I try to stay out of trouble as a Canadian tourist in Grand Theft Auto III.)
- who appears to write about the same "post-Rapture/post-apocalyptic" stuff that I am fascinated with in The City Not Long After and The Stone War

Also I would like to be a fly on the wall for a panel discussion (or just a chat in a bar) between
Jim Munroe, Pat Murphy, and Richard Kadrey (after reading description of "Therefore Repent")

Female Game Industry CEOs

2010-03-01T01:00:00.000-08:00

Doing a quick Google search to see how many more I can find, in addition to our own Mari:

Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain
Shufflebrain looks pretty cool actually.

And here is the top 100 women in games industry according to Edge Online:

Interesting article

2010-01-04T12:07:00.000-08:00

Beyond Rockett and Purple Moon

Want to also read through the comments here to see what specific games they call out in terms of current games liked by these women and girls.

Agree that the Purple Moon games were not that fun.

Example - comment from NerD:Blatella:

12/29/09

Up until last year I worked for a game company. The gender mix was pretty evenly split. There was something interesting that happened there that was related to the game Beyond Good and Evil.

We were trying to find new and inventive things to add to a game we were producing, and I mentioned this game's camera feature in a couple of meetings with the producers and developers. There would always be a great deal of nodding from the women in the room, and quizzical looks from most of the men.

It turned out that I was the only man in the meeting who had played the game.

I find it disappointing when people I consider progressive in every other aspect of their lives won't play something with a female protagonist because it might somehow make them less manly.

Also this comment from
WednesdayAM:

12/29/09

While I do question the idea of girls wanting to "make friends" in games (since I've always been a loner type - which I blame on my middle-child-syndrome tendencies - and hated having to find other people to quest with when I tried WOW for all of one month), I can say this much - my boyfriend and I are butting heads when playing Super Mario Wii due to the simple fact that I want to jump every goomba, kill every piranha plant popping out of a pipe, and break every block to find all possible coins and hidden things, and often he just wants to beat the level and move on. But that's a habit I've had from my loner gaming days. I have girl gaming friends who have the same disposition as me on that, I have others who are more my boyfriend's style of gamer. A lot of this is not gender-specific, it's gaming-preference-specific.

Though, I will admit in a heartbeat that I hate first person shooters that usually end up being used for years solely as multiplayer killfests. Yes, killing your friends is fun for a bit, then it just gets old without there being a point. Give me a game with some open exploration but an actual win-point. I like to win. It's fun.

Character names in games

2009-06-22T15:58:00.000-07:00

Interesting blog post about how character names in games came to be

Amazon List - Puzzle DS games for adult gamer

2009-06-05T16:42:00.001-07:00

DS games for Puzzle-loving adult gamer

to remember for future

Nintendo most successful publisher of decade

2009-06-05T16:24:00.000-07:00

Nintendo most successful game publisher of the decade!

Female Gaming Blogs list (from Blogher-SuperJive)

2009-06-02T11:42:00.001-07:00

List of Female Gaming Blogs (from a post on Blogher by SuperJive)

Making a case for potential PlayFirst ad sponsorship with blogher, this is a good post but there aren't many talking about games (yet!)

In a comment to this post, LaurieWrites wrote the below (in 2007):
Note that she loves DD but thinks of it as "living in Real Arcade" and needed to remember to open Real Arcade to remember what it was called.

I refuse to have these gaming machines of which you speak in my house! Because I would never get anything done. I fear the ones that live in RealArcade. FEAR!!!!! I finally beat the evil "Diner Dash" and also "Flo on the Go" (I know, baby games...but whatever. Designed by diabolical addiction creators! Fie!) I am currently now frightened of "Sally's Salon," which I only know of because I just opened Real Arcade to remember what Diner Dash was called, having forced it out of my mind. Oh. God. No.

Swords+Soldiers: WiiWare (want)

2009-05-19T22:36:00.001-07:00

A Review: http://www.edge-online.com/features/review-swords-soldiers

Want to play. Looks fun and colorful like Castle Crashers, but it's a RTS presented as side-scrolling (looking like a platformer).

Scribblenauts!

2009-05-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

Scribblenauts!!!
I want to play! A DS game with over 220 puzzles that you solve by simply entering in the names of items (apparently almost any kid-friendly non-proper noun) to help you solve the puzzles!

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars - & our "Mission Kenny"

2009-05-19T21:06:00.000-07:00

Today I finished the story part of GTA: Chinatown Wars - but i'm only about 63% complete!

Whew - those credits are long! It looks like they have thanked every single Rockstar office location in the credits for this game. Did they all work on this?

Also - there are new missions that can be downloaded from the Rockstar Social Club site. And because you upload your stats from the game, it can actually provide a custom map of the Rampages and Ride-Along missions that you've not found. I thought I'd found most of them, although not completed them.

holy moly, it's selling at Best Buy right now for $19.99 (huge savings from the launch price of $34.99 when we bought our copies).

Very sad that the US sales went down in April instead of going up: 89,000 units in March (19 days) and 70,000 in April.
But this is such an awesome game!

Notes about the actual game:
I really loved this more than I thought I would. There's something really compelling about it being a portable GTA. It's your own little Liberty City!
The driving is also a lot more forgiving and easier, and the missions are probably pretty easy in terms of a hard-core player, but for me they were just challenging enough to be fun, not so much that they are frustrating.

Unexpectedly fun Missions
(since I suck at GTA driving on PS2 - I can't drive well enough for it to be fun. Is it the analog control? This version actually makes an effort to keep you driving a straight line (as long as you're trying to do so).
The overall goal is to recover your father's sword and uncover what is really going on... but this leads to a wide variety of missions from a cop, other gang lords, etc.
Flying helicopters, hotwiring cars, breaking into gang hangouts, even using a dragon parade costume as camouflage after a bank heist.

- plus drug dealing (think "Dope Wars" or even "Chocolatier"!)
- extra missions (firetruck rescues! vigilante police cars! taxis!) - which all yield special powerups
- shooting out about 90 security cameras (which will eventually yield better drug prices. I have only found 31 of them).
- rampages! (unexpectedly fun to run around causing mayhem with a chainsaw in a tiny simulated game).
- multiplayer!

Back to when I started playing:
About a week after I first got Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars for DS,in mid-March, we had a real-life "Kenny Mission" at the Game Developers Conference.

Those who have played the game know that your character's name is Huang Lee, and the first thing that happens is that your father's sword, which you're delivering to your Uncle Kenny in Liberty City, gets stolen right after you arrive.

I actually felt as if I was part of the game when rushing around during GDC with our Executive Kenny, which was actually pretty fun (and satisfying to make the effort since we actually got some good feedback).

I was going to write this mission as it would be in GTA:Chinatown Wars.

Goal: Get Kenny's feedback and buyin on your project
Setup: "It's been hard for your team to get time with Kenny while he's in SF. You need to get his feedback on your project before he goes back to NZ..."
Top down view of our office - see player character and Kenny character.

(big yellow circle on the ground next to Kenny, who's standing near some cubes.) Player walks into the circle and kicks off cutscene dialog:

Kenny: I have to run to lunch at the W Hotel. If you can walk with me, we can talk and walk. I need to leave right now!"

Switch back to street outside building.
Kenny char in front, with player and design team following.
Kenny character starts walking. Text says: "Keep up with Kenny until he gets to his appt..."
Kenny: ""
player character: running along behind Kenny, who sometimes goes a little faster (like the cars do in the game) - then text will say:
"Don't get Kenny get too far ahead, you won't be able to hear him"

Player does need to stop momentarily to write notes in notebook, which creates some challenge in keeping up with him.

Player and other characters must dash across streets to keep up, sometimes narrowly missing being hit, especially if they were writing notes. (just like in GTA!)

At the W: big yellow circle in front of building (if player has talked enough and stopped and written notes) - player walks into it to get mission complete!
If Kenny gets too far ahead: "Mission Failed: You lost Kenny..."
Hit SELECT to restart mission.

Of course if this were a real GTA:CW mission, the part following Kenny to the W would be just the "travel" portion, which you could "trip skip" when you replay the mission.
After we got there, there would be a secondary goal: "Protect Kenny during his press interview..." with some sort of gang shooting happening which we'd need to defend him from...

Critical and commercial reception:
From the wikipedia page - it looks like - awesome reviews, but lackluster sales:

Chinatown Wars generated lower than expected sales in its first week in the United Kingdom, and did not even sell to level with the debut of Vice City Stories, which was Rockstar's expectation.[38] In the United States, it sold just under 90,000 units during its first two weeks on the American market.[39] This has led Best Buy to begin selling the game for $19.99 for a limited time, a discount of 43% from its standard retail price of $34.99; the response to this has been very positive.[40]

Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure

2009-05-08T22:37:00.000-07:00

A mash-up of a Tetris-like match-3 with platforming... you are Henry Hatsworth, an Indiana-Jones-like archaeologist (complete with young and old versions like in Last Crusade).

You're trying to find the pieces of a golden suit and foiled along the way by various dastardly villains. On the top screen your character is walking along, throwing projectiles (bombs, shooting guns) at enemies, jumping around on platforms, gathering treasure...
On the bottom screen (puzzle world) you have falling blocks that you must do match-3+ puzzles with.
The cool part is that you have power-up squares on the bottom screen, and if you match them, you get powerups on the top screen! (your character gets hearts, longer power meter, etc)
And, every time you kill an enemy on the top screen, they fall down to the bottom screen and become a block. If you can't get rid of the monster block by the time it gets up to the top of the grid, it will appear back up on the main screen, and fall on poor Henry.
So you're constantly killing enemies and jumping around on top, and then freezing the action to match blocks on the bottom.

I played through the first world (4 levels?) and partway through the 2nd world.
Up until I stopped, I was pretty engaged. Sometimes because of my fairly bad platforming skills I'd have to replay a level over and over again, but I always seemed to break through just as I was about to quit.

When in the middle of the 2nd world it just got to be too much restarting. (one reason may have been that I haven't been buying power-ups as often as a normal person, because the only way to launch the SHOP is to use the L shoulder button on the main screen. Oops, my L button is stuck. Why couldn't they have made this a touch screen button, or at least something you can select wtih the d-pad...)

The feeling of frustration starts to overpower the "oooh fun" feeling and after a while I just didn't want to play anymore.
Story not that exciting and I do have a lot of other games to play.
For example, on GTA:CW I also would replay missions over and over, but it never got to the point of
Plus I didn't have the impetus of "I need to get my money's worth out of this" because it's a PF library game.

But, until my frustration and overall ineptitude at platforming interfered, I really liked it.
Great music, great multi-tasking feeling, but it the end the failure kind of overshadowed everything else (especially since I feel like I should have been able to play it better).
I did really love the small amounts of VO -- "Good show!" when he powered up into the robot version (TEA-TIME!)

Akihiro Hino's Keys to Success

2009-03-26T01:17:00.000-07:00

Link to Gamasutra report on this talk given by Hino of Level 5 (which is one of my favorite developers) - Prof. Layton, Dark Cloud, Rogue Galaxy.

One of the things he is advising for, is to keep the "boom triggers" or buzzwords in mind from the beginning of the planning stages for a game.

This is very good for me to keep in mind moving forward for new game. The more we are in the same mindset, the better.

The first concept that Hino brought up was the concept of "catch copy" -- a Japanese expression he translated as "buzzword" but which might also be broken down to a "bullet point" -- something unique about a title, that catches the attention of the audience.

The key, though, is something many developers might not agree with -- Hino suggests that "Promotion has to be taken into account from the point of planning a game. The creators also have to think about promotion, and promoting the game as they start planning the game itself."

Hino even admits that this may be his weakness. "I think more about the successful launches than about the [game] story itself. Sometimes I say something so outlandish that we have to worry about how the creators will make it later."
 
The first example he cited was the company's Professor Layton series. Though, as a questioner noted that these points refer to the Japanese market specifically, the concepts do map globally (just not all of them, in this specific case.)

- Mix of puzzles and story
- Collaborative work with Dr. Tago, whose book sold over 12 million copies
- Voice over casting of stars, and movie-quality animation

Mission Kenny

2009-03-25T15:07:00.000-07:00

placeholder for blog re: Kennydash with designers - in motion walking to his lunch interview at the W in the midst of GDC.

Wandering Willows

2009-03-24T22:53:00.000-07:00

Some of this may or may not wind up on the new PlayFirst blog, but I wanted to write something here amongst all my extra-curricular gaming interests.

NOW THAT WANDERING WILLOWS IS FINALLY OUT!!!

Please download it and play it for its free trial!

A shorter version of my "behind the scenes" internal email, to follow up to Erin and DRP's blogs:
Overall: this is really one of the most rewarding professional experiences I've had to date.
Working with a small but talented and experienced team of people who really care about the game we're making, is really rare. And in a company of people that I like and respect.

I guess since everyone is using names I will too for now. I don't think anyone actually reads this blog anyway :-).

Guy Romhild and Adam Gourdin, QA
Peri and Bryan - site QA
QA really are the unsung heroes of all software projects, and PF is no exception. All of these people really care about the quality of each game and site feature that the customer sees, and have been fans of the project since the beginning (also Chris D had been waiting for more quests since an early version. Now 162!)

Dan Chao - Lead Game Designer, Original Concept:
I've worked with external developers and also huge internal teams, so I really enjoyed being able to work with Dan directly as he came up with the idea for the game and moved it forward. Then we had to pitch it to various sets of executives at different times.
And then together with the team, he crafted out this large game, its design, wrote the 162 quests, and much more that really underscores the game's "surprise and delight" that so many reviews call out. For example, I totally forgot that we had a quest in the game that involved pinkeye (JJ). In the midst of a small "pinkeye plague" at the office, I came upon this quest while playing through Willows and LOLed.
It's like when I re-read a favorite book - I know exactly how the game is going to end but I am still surprised every time by the path(s) we take to get there.

David Ryan Paul, Lead Artist
DRP's blog really speaks for itself. He is a world-builder - the entire game has such a unified visual style. I am really glad to have the chance to work with him on this - his opinions in general are usually spot on, not only about art issues, but the project itself.

Erin Middendorf, Associate Artist
Erin's blog speaks for itself too! Maybe she could have the nickname of "expert on cute"! She also revised one of her personal designs for me to use on a magnet for my Hike for Discovery thank you gift, which I still need to distribute.

Jim Brooks, Lead Engineer, Game
He's the ninja-neer!
I was just talking about him to another developer at the PF GDC party - he is the bedrock of Games Engineering, and I am lucky enough to also have worked with him on Diner Dash: Hometown Hero. I think I am spoiled.

Me: I often feel like I am here to make sure all those above can do their jobs - it's really moving stuff forward as much as I can and not standing in their way accidentally. In the end we did ship on time for all of our dates for the last 8 months, so I take that as a personal milestone because that hasn't happened for past projects.

Managers and Execs: I have had several managers over this timeframe - Rebekah was a huge force during the early period, and Michael has been a good influence at the end as well.
Nick, Michael McC, Kenny, Bernie, Brad, Sheridan, John, Anne Marie, Heidi, and Sean (marketing) have all been very supportive and provided for the funds!
Basically it's the whole company - the whole site team and everyone making stuff work.

Review links:
Gamezebo: 4.5 stars

Unique game play, beautiful artwork, and a funny storyline with colorful characters will prove Wandering Willows a winner among adventure and sim game fans young and old. This game offers a challenge without the pressure of time constraints, and since it will likely take you at least 20 hours to complete all the quests, it's a great value for the price.

Jayisgames: "big long sentence"

It's a pet-raising recipe-collecting item-bartering friend-gaining character-customizing leveling-up collect-a-thon!

Meryl.net:

Casualicious Review:

Most of the time when seasoned casual gamers hear of the company called PlayFirst, the name is always associated with time management “Dash” games. But aside from this, they are also known for bringing very innovative games like Chocolatier and Dream Chronicles into the casual gaming scene. Wandering Willows is one such innovation. And this time, PlayFirst again offers a gameplay never before seen on their roster of recent casual offerings.

March 19 announcements:

MacWorld - probably the best restating of the press release...
PlayFirst is best known for casual games like the seemingly unstoppable Diner Dash series of task-management games. The company is exploring new territory with Wandering Willows — they classify the game using two terms we don’t often hear together — casual and RPG (role playing game).

Dan's quote for the press release:

“Wandering Willows is a unique title in PlayFirst’s portfolio as it offers a much more open-ended experience and heightened interaction,” said Dan Chao, lead game designer. “Player progression and customisation are the key elements that were crucial to our overall design process enabling a unique and more engaging experience for every player."

GDC 2009 and PF party

2009-03-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

So far, have not gone to any panels or lectures for GDC.
We picked up the PF badge in my name on Sunday night and went out for dinner with my cousin Chris at Thirsty Bear Brewing Company.

Little did we suspect that Satoru Iwata, president and CEO of Nintendo, would be seated at the table next to us.

Did not talk to him of course. Geeked out about it on the street outside and Chris found a picture online to compare with our memories. Yes, it was him.

Today PlayFirst launched Wandering Willows to the public and I was happy to be able to go to our PF developer party at GDC.
I met several developers who seemed excited to hear about Willows, and talked to them about their projects and all. Also really good to see Kenny who works in SF but has been in NZ for months, and Michelle who works on the East Coast.

This was the 2 year anniversary of first meeting Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games,
after my cousin Chris Dahlen smartly recognized him at the PlayFirst Diner Bash 2007 and I managed to connect him to Kenny briefly at the party. Kenny already was a fan of Dave's game The Shivah.

That led to us starting to work on the early stages of the game that became Emerald City Confidential - which along with WW is one of the other games that launched this quarter.
I can't take credit for more than that initial work to get the deal signed, since Michael and others took over at that point, and the project was nto necessarily easy to finish.
But I do feel really good to have helped them make the connection. Maybe it feels a little like being a literary agent - matching up writers and publishers. I think the game is quite good, as do many reviewers.
And Dave has learned a lot about what works to get the casual audience more into his games.

After the PF party I felt a little lost. Too early to go to the Minna Mingle, which I hadn't RSVP'ed to anyway.
Most of the other PF people were taking a developer out to dinner.
I called a couple friends and Chris to see where they were, and walked past the Minna Mingle. That intersection at 4th and Mission was interesting: small hordes of people, mostly guys, wandering around apparently from party to party? dinner to party?
I saw one small group of women go by. Also did some good eavesdropping. It didn't feel too weird to just hang out there since there were so many people around. And I still had a little buzz from the PF party.

Not too sure I wanted to enter into another crowd where I didn't know people, I decided to jump on BART and go home. I also have a dinner on Wed and Dave's Wadjet Eye party on Thursday.

Ada Lovelace Day - Women of PlayFirst

2009-03-24T21:30:00.000-07:00

This is my Ada Lovelace Day post about a woman in technology I admire.

Is it cheating for it be about all the women at PlayFirst, especially those working directly in game or site development?
We're making games for women and a good number of us are women, which is a good thing.
And these in particular:
Erin, Sora, Peri, Jen, Angel, Vicki. Michelle, Maria. Also my new partners in design crime: Helen and Dana.
And Allison, Ji and any others I've forgotten.
Devin and Kristina in absentia...and the original gamegirls: Prof Carrie Heeter, Toby Levenson, and Pat Murphy.

(and not to be a brown-noser, but I do really admire Mari - especially this interview where she talks about her "a-ha" moment in tech.
When I first googled her I found this article and thought...hmmm!
We kind of had a similar a-ha moment, both at Stanford, except that hers was about computers in general and mine was on the web. Different time periods. )

Chrono Trigger

2009-02-22T20:28:00.000-08:00

Borrowed from Alexei in trade for DQ4 - around 2/18/09
BART-first: (my description of the first hour or so, on BART ride, going home):
I never played this game back in the day (1995) when it came out on the SNES.
So this is my first time playing.
Opens with the traditional - just woke up, mom tells me to go to a festival, etc etc.
At the festival - lots to do, I find out the next day that I should NOT have eaten the old guy's lunch and I should have helped the little girl find her kitty (I restarted the save file)...
Some spoilers below - but not many:
Surprised to be time-traveling very quickly in the first hour. If this were a download game with an hour trial, I would have been hooked quite quickly, because I time travel and I get clear explanation of what the goal is (and it's interesting!)

I am always fascinated by any story where you are changing the "Might Have Beens" in the past to influence the future (in this case, to save your friend who all of a sudden disappeared in the present).
I think this began with A Swiftly Tilting Planet. And of course the fascination continued with Back to the Future, Quantum Leap, and so on.

Anyway -this sucked me in. Plus you get a frog in your party. Which I named Dave in honor of my husband...but then he left and I was sad.
There's some long thread on gamespot about how they thought this game was hard to follow, but I think it's done a good job of pulling you along in the story without a big need to check faqs.
My main faq dependence has been for boss strategies - although i was proud to correctly get that if the boss monster says "just attack! see what happens!" it probably means that he has a big counter-attack waiting and I should wait.

And the battle system is fun - active turn-based battle, so things are always happening and I never know if I'm moving fast enough. The combo tech attacks create some good strategy options, if one remembers to wait for 2 character's meters to fill up....

It's still sucking me in now, which can be a problem since I should either be reading or writing on the train. But I'm happy I got a chance to play this since it's a famous rpg that everyone makes a big deal about. Glad to see the hoopla is actually deserved!

Almost finished in early March. Still need to fight the final boss. Got distracted by work, also GTA DS, and Steambot Chronicles.

Dragon Quest 4: Chapters of the Chosen

2009-02-18T20:08:00.000-08:00

I got this game in late Dec 2008, after returning from Mpls. I'd reserved it at Play and Trade to see if I was going to buy this or Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger wasn't there to try, and I was sad for a little bit after I bought this, thinking I should have got CT instead. However I did love this also in the end and actually finished it! (And was able to trade it to a friend and also get Chrono Trigger...woohoo!)
This game joins the ranks of the few that I've actually finished - to see the long final credits of a Square Enix game, quite an accomplishment. I did not play the bonus Chapter 6 which is on this DS version, I got maybe halfway through that bonus dungeon before trading the cartridge with Alexei to get Chrono Trigger.

What I love about this game:
* the variety of the characters as the story moves forward. The game is split into 4 chapters, where you control a different character or group in each. Then in the 5th chapter, you are the Hero, and go around meeting/collecting all the people - "the chosen" - that you, the player, met in the previous 4 chapters.
People online have said the early chapters are too easy but I really enjoyed them being short and fun in what they were.
In one chapter, you are Torneko the merchant, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that he actually sells weapons behind a counter to other chars to make money.
I hadn't read ahead in the walkthrough for this game so this was some fun variety.
* the monster variety is also fun and familiar from playing Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker - which I started but haven't yet finished.
* the ending sequence was fun to tie everything up and see the stories of the characters to an end - since it visited each character's homeland.

What I liked less:
* I tend to fall asleep playing dragon quest games a little more than others. I think my favorite turn based option is active battle like FFIV and Chrono Trigger, or just straight action (non turn-based). If I played this before bed I found myself getting sleepy a little too often.

Overall though I did love this game and looking forward to playing Dragon Quest V, which focuses on the life of 1 hero, through marriage, child-raising, and the career of the child also. But Chrono Trigger will come first.

What is she (or he) playing?

2009-01-14T22:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday when going down the stairs at Millbrae BART I saw a woman sitting across the way at the Caltrain platform, playing a white DS.

“What’s she playing?” I thought. She was only using the buttons, leaned over the DS, and putting quite a lot of energy into it. Super Mario Brothers?

Sometimes I can actually guess, but only one time have I been able to verify the guess.

He was sitting across from me on BART a few months ago. Now I don’t usually take pictures of people on the train, but this guy was so obviously playing The World Ends With You – relatively frantic stylus swiping while hitting the d-pad. Plus he looked a bit like he would be into a Squeenix awesome RPG like The World Ends With You. So I did, but won't post it here.

When I got to work that day, I told this story to my coworker, and showed him a quick snapshot I took of the guy with my Treo. Coworker exclaimed, “I KNOW that guy! It’s my friend ___”. Pretty wacky.

At breakfast this Saturday I saw a little girl (8?) playing her pink DS. I could not figure out what she was playing (a little too far away) and too shy to ask.

I guess I just love to see other people choosing to game in public. Especially if it’s another woman, validates me a little more.

Lock's Quest

2008-12-24T20:51:00.000-08:00

Another game that I must finish but not using my own DS - need Dave's better touch screen.

Very addictive - it's like a tower defense game mashed together with an RPG. Starts off with very simple missions and keeps you moving forward without a lot of failure involved. The missions flow into each other very quickly because it feels like you must keep playing or else the Clockworks (evil machine robots) will take over and plus, you'll never find Lock's poor sister!

Maybe I am about 20% through this? I think I read there are 100 missions.

Soul Bubbles

2008-12-23T20:40:00.000-08:00

I was playing this game in December during Christmas break and plan to pick it back up again to finish it eventually (maybe I am 3/4 of the way through).
The game is very relaxing and somewhat challenging in later levels at the same time. I was getting to a point where I needed to fire projectiles at enemies, and my gimpy touchscreen was failing me there.
If I keep going I'd probably use Dave's DS.
Best things:
* the tutorial and the level design - at least for the intro levels where a new mechanic is being introduced - they do it very seamlessly. Half the time when something new is presented, I got it from the context - but there is always also a little tutorial help icon to click on later on in the level, in case I didn't get it completely.
* the music and overall environment - very well done graphically and aurally.

I think this game got panned a bit by the hardcore reviewers. If we pushed it to a casual audience (even ported it to PC) it would probably sell a lot more. Hmmm...
it doesn't need to be DS, exactly...

2008-08-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

Gamasutra just posted a list of the top 20 breakthrough developers.

I'm happy to say that one of them, Wadjet Eye Games, is currently working on a game for PlayFirst, and that I helped PlayFirst sign them up (via meeting him at GDC in 2007, introduced by my cousin Chris Dahlen).

Also I was really happy to see how many of the games published by these developers, are the games I play and love.

Here's a summary:

1. 2D Boy (Page 2) - developers of World of Goo. I have not played World of Goo, but one of the co-founders (Kyle Gabler) was an intern or similarly junior engineer when I was at Maxis/EA, although I don't know him.
2. 5TH Cell (Page 3) - Developers of the DS game Drawn to Life, which I have wanted to play but have not. Also developers of Lock's Quest, which I have played - see later post.
3. Area/Code (Page 4) - Developers of the wildly addictive Facebook game Parking Wars, which I do play!
4. Atlus (Page 5) - developers of the Trauma Center series (which I love) and the Persona series, which we did recently buy. Also publishers of Steambot Chronicles, which I want to buy, and they bring all kinds of Japanese games over to t
5. The Behemoth (Page 6) - Alien Hominid, which I haven't played and not that high on the list, but they look interesting, and the art is cool.
6. Certain Affinity (Page 7) - apparently they did a Halo 2 map pack and are coming out later this year with what looks like a pretty fun pirate game called Age of Booty.
7. Double Fine (Page 8) - Dave and I both love Psychonauts, although we still need to finish it!

They are working on this game which is going to be voiced by Jack Black, it looks pretty fun:

"Though its publishing status is currently in question as of this writing, Brütal Legend is expected this fall; the game is an action-adventure journey tracing the adventures of metal band roadie Eddie Riggs as he makes his way through a fantasy world that fuses metal rock with Nordic legend."

8. Grasshopper Manufacture (Page 9) - OMG! No More Heroes! I rented it and played it obsessively, and almost finished it (got to last boss and got a bit frustrated dying). For me it was like Pulp Fiction. I didn't think I was going to like it before I went, and then I loved it!
9. Gearbox Software (Page 10) - the Brothers in Arms series which I haven't paid much attention to, but also a version of Samba de Amigo for the Wii coming out!
10. Hothead Games (Page 11) - Penny Arcade Adventures with the help of Ron Gilbert of LucasArts fame. Both Gilberts in da house on this list - see our friend Dave Gilbert (sometimes confused with Ron Gilbert at industry events) at #20.

11. Infinite Interactive (Page 12) - Puzzle Quest - played first on PC at work, got captivated, Dave and I started playing on DS!

12. Level-5 (Page 13) - I just found out about this company this year (and late last year) and have played a lot of games they've released: Dragon Quest VIII, Rogue Galaxy (which was a Xmas present I still haven't finished, but i'd like to), and Professor Layton and the Curious Village.

And then they're also doing Dragon Quest IX on the DS!

13. Media Molecule (Page 14) - LittleBigPlanet, which is a PS3 exclusive, but one of the only PS3 titles that I might get excited about if we had a PS3.

14: Metanet (Page 15) = 2D platformer N+ which is on XBLA now and coming out on DS soon.
15. PlatinumGames (Page 16) - includes two alumni from Clover, which developed the awesome Okami! They are working on a game called "MadWorld" for the Wii.
16. Q-Games (Page 17)
17. Thatgamecompany (Page 18)
18: Treasure (Page 19)
19. Valve South (formerly Turtle Rock) (Page 20)
20. Wadjet Eye Games (Page 21)

Each entry is followed by a short write-up.

Final Fantasy IV

2008-08-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

I was playing this in the summer but I think I stopped because I got stuck in a long dungeon, and because Vy and Alexei started talking about The World Ends With You again so I picked that up and started on the Secret Reports.

I think I liked FF III more than FF IV because of the job system - I liked being able to choose different jobs for different characters as the game went on.
However - I like the Active Battle system in FF IV much more than the standard turn-based play in FF IV.

Also the storyline is good here but apparently it has not been enough for me to jump up and keep pushing forward in the dungeon of my save file.

The World Ends With You

2008-07-01T21:42:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel that in 2008 I have been singlehandedly supporting Square Enix!

This is probably the best game I have played all of 2008 (and Persona 4 counts for 2009).
It's just fun - fun to collect, fun to work through the story, dialogue is funny - we even had lunchtime pin trades at work, with Vy showing up to trade pins with us across everyone's DS. Selling and buying and leveling up, oh my!
I finished this game and am almost through the "secret reports" bonus chapters.
A great way to reuse the content in each chapter, to give you a set of additional goals to complete using the same content on your 2nd playthrough.
Also this is great for the original story and modern setting. It's caused a lot of people to get excited about visiting or learning about Shibuya as well.

Interesting Gamasutra article about D&D thievery

2008-06-13T12:59:00.000-07:00

Not on stealing things in D&D, but on stealing things from D&D...especially in the new 4.0 version.

Link here.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness

2008-06-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

I can't remember when exactly I finished this, but I remember I was trying to finish it so I could play something else.
Sadly I bought it just before our wedding and wound up playing it now and then at Pt Reyes on the honeymoon.
I named my partner Pokemon that was with me for much of the game - "PokeDave". This was very touching at various points, as PokeDave told me how much he needed me to keep going, and so on.
The storyline of the game itself actually wasn't too bad, and I was having fun capturing pokemon and naming them after people -- there was also a Birk, and a Jim, etc.
After finishing all of Pokemon Diamond, it was nice to use all this random knowledge for something.
it's kind of like playing multiple Dragon Quest games and not having to learn about all the enemies again. But I guess this kind of knowledge for someone who's 34, is a little bit odd.

at WisCon reading GameSetWatch...

2008-05-24T20:07:00.000-07:00

I am at WisCon and unfortunately starting to get spacey and coming down with a cold.

Taking a break in my room I checked out my Google Reader which is of course seeded with gaming blogs.

So I see a post about this Flash-based side-scrolling WoW-like RPG called "WTF?!".

Apparently this is by Robert Nideffer and Alex Szeto. Nideffer, googling him quickly, is apparently a professor at the UC-Irvine Game Lab.
He worked on a game called DinoQuest Online, which according to the pdfs I looked at, seems pretty boring. Szeto worked on this too.

For the WTF?! game - it's only in demo version now but they are releasing their engine for free...
let me go play it...
The gameplay is pretty boring so far - I killed 8 pigs and then didn't really get a new quest but i see some Karl Marx converts down the road.

It's a pretty good proof of concept of being able to do WoW quality graphics in Flash. But it's not multiplayer and not that fun right now...
And it's also pretty much anti-feminist since you are killing followers of Mary Daly, who actually looks quite cool. And the people you attack say things like "I smell testicles!"

So, huh, actually not that interesting in content, but as a technical proof of concept, maybe. Let's see them do this as a true multiplayer game though.
Also ForumWarz is a lot more fun...

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates

2008-04-01T21:18:00.000-07:00

I really loved this game - not exactly sure why.
It was just challenging enough to be fun but not frustrating. I liked the story. I like the cute characters.
It's an action battle scheme - no turn based battles. Hack and slash and use magicite to cast spells and/or L/R button to use tribal abilities.
Also a nice mix of platforming and puzzle solving along with the slashing.
And even crafting - finding ingredients dropped from enemies and then making them at shops.

This sucked me in enough to start a new playthrough, since there was lots of new items to make and buy and equip on the new playthrough. Even with no other added content, this seemed to be enough.

Finished Prof. Layton

2008-03-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

I got all 135 puzzles on Prof. Layton, but used the faq for a few, and used the in-game hints quite liberally...why not use the hint coins if there are so many of them!

I enjoyed it quite a bit...

Mabinogi!

2008-03-06T13:14:00.000-08:00

This is the Campfire - you can chop wood and sit around the Campfire, sharing food and playing musical instruments!

There is a composer utility on their site:

Launch page for Mabinogi Open Beta....

The Making of Japan's First RPGs...

2008-03-06T13:10:00.000-08:00

An article from Next Generation about Henk Rogers...

Hard to imagine a time when you'd need to sell the concept of an RPG game to Japan!

"As well as introducing the RPG genre to Japan, Rogers’ game (Black Onyx) was responsible for launching some heavyweight videogame careers. Hisashi Suzuki, a Keio University student and part-timer at Bullet-Proof Software, wrote the manual. Suzuki would later go on to become president of Square Enix."

Prof. Layton and the Curious Village

2008-02-22T20:00:00.000-08:00

Prof. Layton and his cronies were running around GDC giving out puzzles on cards.

I took one, all smiling, and heard the guy behind me on the street yell out "I love this game!!!"

I love this game, too! It saved me last weekend in the airport when my flight was canceled...

It's cute, it's intelligent, and it's fun!

And it's by Level-5, who also developed another game that has sucked up my time - Rogue Galaxy. And also Dragon Quest 8 (and the upcoming Dragon Quest 9 for DS).

Combines various kinds of puzzles (logic, simple math, riddles) with a point and click adventure and a forgiving hint system, which I haven't had to use as much as I thought I would.

"Every puzzle has an answer!" as Layton's VO sometimes remarks when you finish a puzzle.
Not yet finished yet, but this is quite fun.

No More Heroes

2008-02-13T20:41:00.000-08:00

I rented this game from Blockbuster and almost finished it in a little over a week...it was good. People compare it to Kill Bill due to the assassin subject matter and nutso storyline, but it actually made me remember how I felt before I went to see Pulp Fiction (and also the Matrix).

Both times, I thought I would not like either movie, but voila, I went and I loved them.
Same thing here. It's just fun to slash at enemies with your beam katana (A button on the Wiimote) and then do a motion at the end for a finishing wrestling move.
And lots of blood all over.

I did not beat the final boss at the very end, but I made it to assassin rank #1!

I know people at work would think this sounds crazy - but it's even "casual" in some ways.

* It's organized into pretty small chunks that can be satisfyingly finished in an evening (save up money for entry fee to attack the next assassin, train up at the gym, and then go beat each boss)

* Gameplay itself is not frustratingly hard - I played at the easiest difficulty and it wasn't completely cake but also was forgiving enough that I wound up almost finishing. And I'm not good at combat games.

* The story is fun and pulls you along from segment to segment - creative to save "on the toilet"...

It's not a big open world like GTA but then, it doesn't really need to be...

Penny Arcade comic on Jeff Gerstmann

2007-12-02T23:56:00.000-08:00

Penny Arcade sums up this situation (and in a blog post they have several links to the various articles - Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot reviewed the game Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, giving it a 6.0, while Eidos, publisher of Kane and Lynch, had spent many $$$ on ad money to GameSpot.
Result - Jeff is fired.

I just wanted to say -- of course I don't always agree with GameSpot's reviews either, but Jeff's exuberance about the Wii on launch day was one of the things that got me even more jazzed to get one after watching their coverage.

And of course as someone who makes games, I'd like to think that reviewers aren't just in the pocket of the game companies - if someone really doesn't like our games, they should be able to say so (and frequently they do).

I thought it was interesting that the public response so far from Jeff has been in a response to a Facebook message, pointing out that he can't confirm or deny any rumors...

Civil Unions in Sims 2

2007-12-02T23:22:00.000-08:00

So rarely do I see a blog post about the detail of Text in The Sims 2, something I did contribute to and have some stories about...
-- that it is kind of sad that it is about the fact that we had to name the interaction for marriage for same-sex couples a "civil union" instead of just calling it "marriage," like the interaction for opposite-sex couples.
At least there is same-sex marriage in the game, as the blogger points out, in Sims 1 same-sex couples could only be "roommates."
I remember this renaming being very frustrating at the time -- it actually was "marriage" for everyone in the beginning but then we had to change it (making two sets of memories, Wants, and interaction trees).

Investigaming

2007-11-07T23:47:00.000-08:00

I got to speak to Prof. Heeter's class at Michigan State University today - they are working on a site called Investigaming, which is designed to link game research going on in academia, with the game industry, and to help the game industry make use of the research.

This was their final class meeting, so I was kind of a featured guest speaker, which made me feel quite awkward.
Carrie did a good job of keeping questions going - I hope I didn't babble too much.
This class is part of the Serious Game Design MA program, which just got started at MSU this year.
I tried to give some advice about getting into the game industry but it seems like almost everyone I know has "gotten" into the game industry in a mix of networking, luck, and knowledge/talent. But more on the networking and luck side I think.

I mentioned LinkedIn, game conferences like GDC and the Women in Games conference, and internships ( a la the "farm team" that Maxis had or has with Carnegie Mellon).

When I emailed out this picture to our production group and some of the execs, our CTO wrote back to say that he was happy to see that the teleconferencing software he developed while at Macromedia, is being put to good use!

Skyrates!

2007-10-27T11:30:00.000-07:00

Skyrates is "a multiplayer online game that has you taking on the role of an ace pilot trying to conquer the skies. Whether you are a peaceful trader, a careful diplomat, or a bold fighter, the sky's the limit!

My cousin Chris talked about this game on his blog.
So I tried it out.

It's pretty fun.
Here's my Skyrate.

I'm also still working on finishing Zelda - getting the last of the precious metals for my Phantom Sword now.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

2007-10-19T00:15:00.000-07:00

Just finished Phantom Hourglass, November 2.
The last save is before the final boss, so I could sail around and look for more ship parts and fish for Neptoona, but after the story was over I lost that pull a bit.
I loved it though!

from earlier:
This is probably one of the best games ever!
Some say it's too easy, it's just right for me -- just challenging enough to be interesting but not frustratingly so.
I am about half way through I think. I had been suspicious of the stylus-only gameplay but it is quite fun and easy to control. Even with my stylus that seems to refuse to calibrate properly and so it's always a few pixels off -- it works.
It's just a joy to play - obviously a lot of thought, and it doesn't break the tried and true Zelda gameplay that people have loved since the original Legend of Zelda.
I am almost to the icy island, which I think has some of the cutest characters in the whole game! (at least from the Nintendo Power articles).

Metroid Prime Corruption

2007-09-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

3 things I love about this game:
1. The puzzles and pacing (at least so far). It's a first person shooter but there's also a lot of scanning for information, figuring out puzzles and exploring the world. The combat is not overwhelmingly difficult but it is challenging enough to be fun.

2. The controls are quite fun. When I first played this demo at E3 2006, I really liked the grapple control (hold down a button on the nunchuk and flip your wrist forward to throw an electrical beam at a door, or a shield on an enemy, and then just pull back to rip it off). I still like it. I also love jumping in this game much more than in Metroid Prime Hunters (where it was often frustrating to jump up on platforms)

3. The graphics and audio are very immersive and well done. For example, when you're wearing one of Samus's visors, you can see her eyes reflected in the visor, just barely. I didn't notice that at first and was like "what is that"? It really makes you feel like you're playing as Samus to see that (and makes it more obvious that she is a woman).

Pokemon Diamond Hall of Fame!

2007-09-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

Last week (Sept. 17) I finally beat the "Elite Four" and the Champion, Cynthia, in Pokemon Diamond. Thanks to much BART travel back and forth to work.

This coincides with us setting our wedding date, and with the wrapping up of my part of DD:HH.

My Pokemon were:
1. Pea, a Roserade, level 56 (received from Evade originally)
2. Gyrados, level 56 (trained up from a Magicarp I had caught)
3. ayudamon, a Blissey, also level 56. The savior of the team as she can heal other pokemon in between battles and heals herself by attacking enemies.
4. Electrik, a Luxray, level 61, trade from Evade. Has the Thief move and lots of good electrical moves
5. Mismagius, level 63, received as a trade from Star on Nintendo's WiFi Global Trading System
6. Blue Steel, my Dialga, around level 50-something.

I was very surprised that when walking around in the area around the Battle Tower after seeing the credits and getting through the final four, there were _STILL_ more pokemon than the original 150 I had seen to complete the Sinnoh Pokedex.

Amazing amount of replay value and if I was going to continue playing more of the Pokemon GBA games to really catch them all, this would be a spur to do that.
Some of the new Pokemon you find are only seen with other trainers (not in the wild) so they can't be caught yet.

I found the Battle Tower pretty boring because you get so few Battle points for going through a 7-battle series, that it would be tedious to keep going. And I don't care about buying the items really.

Note that Nintendo just came out with a new website for the Global Trading System...

My PlayFirst avatar!

2007-09-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

Here is my new PlayFirst avatar (will be on the site on Monday night)...

Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon

2007-08-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

I remember I was very excited about this game - combining Harvest Moon virtual life gameplay with RPG combat, etc.
I did have a lot of fun with it, but when I checked a faq briefly, I realized I was playing very slowly -- and probably would take a while to be "done" - always kept dying in the dungeons, etc.
It might be fun to pick this up again, but by this point a sequel on DS has already come out (which got a lower gamespot score than the original) and a Wii Rune Factory game is due out in March 2009 (along with a whole ton of other games.) So I"m not sure how this will work out.

Pokemon Diamond - and list

2007-05-19T00:43:00.000-07:00

Our friend went to the store last weekend and bought Pokemon Pearl for himself and Pokemon Diamond for me (and I reimbursed) -- then after I spent several hours playing, Evade went and bought his own copy of Pearl. Now we have 3 - AS, Jax, and Evade.

Update 9/15 - I now have all 8 badges in Pokemon Diamond and am trying to finish the Elite 4. It's a slow progress on BART as now I am also playing DD and Wedding Dash on the train as well.

Kongregate

2007-03-24T20:58:00.000-07:00

Just saw this site mentioned in the Mercury News today. It's a gaming community site - with a twist in that it supports an apparently quick and easy upload process to upload your own (Flash) games.

And there's a metagame going on, for the site as a whole - you earn points, etc playing the games and uploading your own, and redeem them to get cards in Kongregate's own TCG, which is being designed by my former Backbone colleague, David Sirlin. Hmm..

I played Fancy Pants Adventures, which is really just a stick figure with pants that you guide around with the arrow keys, but has some really fun physics stuff going on, like Line Rider except you are actually controlling the little guy the whole time instead of setting up a course and then watching him go.

You apparently jump on enemies to attack them a la Mario, and there's a lot of fun loop the looping going on. And people were actually chatting in the chat room.

Also - "Kongregate shares between 25% and 50% of ad revenue with developers."

Wonderland Adventures

2007-03-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

I just briefly played Wonderland Adventures on the 60 minute free trial and was quite sucked into it until I got to a puzzle where I kept frying my "Stinky" character on a set of fire geysers, because I'm not focusing enough on the patterns.

The game has very simple 3D graphics with cute yellow characters that look like little Pac Men (yellow round characters) that can be customized by the user. They also remind me of Zoombinis.

You wind up going on a series of adventures - in the first place, saving groups of young 'Stinkies' by waking them up and leading them out of the caves where they're trapped. Initially there are simple 'step on the colored square and open the colored gate' puzzles, but there's some surprise there, as the square that you think will open up a bridge going one direction actually opens it in another place, where you can then access the trigger you want. You can also use some of the stinkies you're rescuing to stand on triggers to keep some of the gates open.

After the initial "gate" adventures, there were a couple more that had "teleport" like areas where the character got boomeranged to another part of the level. There's really fun sfx and vox here so the character is exclaiming as they are flung around, which is quite entertaining.

So, the graphics not state of the art but the attention paid to gameplay and making the characters fun, is quite good. I would have kept playing had I not been slightly frustrated by the fire puzzle and not wanting to spend my whole free trial there.

Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

2007-03-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

I can't figure out if this game would have enough staying power for me or not. I like the leveling up and getting new spells, but I am just not the best 3 in a row player and so I keep losing.

Here's the PC Demo link. It's supposed to be out on DS now but everyone has trouble finding it in the stores.

Get the Glass

2007-03-21T13:07:00.001-07:00

Get the Glass

Family going after a milk glass

blatant plug

2007-03-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

Cousins at GDC!

2007-03-08T00:41:00.000-08:00

Cousins at the Game Developer’s Conference! Picture taken by developer we met at PF DinerBash!
This is so freaky. Waiting for the BART on the way home from the Red Room, (the Red Room is a writing studio I just started going to and which will be written about in the book blog), I decided to google “Blackwell Legacy faq”.
I just wanted to see if I can avoid having to ask Dave Gilbert, the creator of the game who I just met yesterday, how to get past the part where you have to get a picture of JoAnn, a girl who’s committed suicide but her dormmates won’t help you. It’s for an article the character, Rosangela Blackwell, is writing for the Village Eye. A bit of a surprise assignment since she’s usually a mild-mannered book reviewer.
Maybe I could find the answer somewhere online without having to reveal myself as a stoopid adventure gamer.
(But I did get through Hotel Dusk pretty well with almost no hinting !)

(breath).

As I thought, the critical mass of people who don’t quite get this puzzle, is either not quite there yet or doesn’t come up in the first few Google hits visible on my Treo screen.
But what did come up is the link to Dave Gilbert’s blog.

I bring it up – and am amazed and surprised to find that Dave G has written about meeting me and my cousin Chris at the PF party the other night.
And there’s a picture, which I remember him taking. I might actually have my eyes open in that picture! (something rare).
Quite entertaining, a quote from Kenny. I think Dave got the order of meeting a little wrong though - giving credit where it's due, it was Chris who spotted him and pointed him out (since he'd seen his talk earlier I think).

I get on the train and can read most of the page still even though I’ve lost reception on the Treo so it's not updating anymore. It just feels very eerie to have randomly found this just then and be reading it on public transit.
The rest of the blog is pretty entertaining and detailed also. Since I do not get to go to much at the GDC (except Miyamoto-san tomorrow!) because we’re sharing 2 passes amongst 8 people, it’s fun to read.
Impressive amount of detail written about an event that we’re still in the middle of – and I have had no time to send out my notes from Women in Games on Tuesday.

I realize after this party that I like working for a publisher much better than working for a developer, which I was doing more recently.
I like this feeling of trying to scout around for good stuff for us to distribute or publish, especially if it’s something I actually like to play, like these games or Tasty Planet (which is already being sold on the site after Ethan and I brought it up a couple months ago)! Buy it!

Lunar Knights for DS

2007-03-02T23:55:00.000-08:00

Borrowed from a colleague, this game is now back with its owner (not by my choice, I would have kept it longer!)

This game is the "next-gen" version of the Boktai series for GBA, but doesn't have their solar sensor built in as the GBA cartridges did. I don't miss that much - you get the same gameplay here with night and day being shown on the top screen, along with weather.

I like the main gameplay with your two characters, specializing in melee and ranged attacks, getting through dungeons and solving various puzzles (hit the switch with your ranged character, etc). As in original Boktai there's a lot of stealth, but you're not able to slide up against the wall and hide. (Seems like people in the forums are very sad about this).

The weapons can be upgraded with junk parts found throughout the levels, but initially the game seems to suggest you need to tediously upgrade the weapon before you can leave the first dungeon.
The interface for showing what parts you have to upgrade the weapon and which you need, seems a bit confusing also.

The game seemed to come together when I first started having more than one "terennial" or pokemon-like elemental being that helps your attacks, to switch between.

After almost every dungeon, you defeat a vampire or group of vampires and then fly their casket up to a satellite to be purified. This is like having to drag the casket through the level as in Boktai.
But the initial level just seemed way too hard for a "here's your first time with this shooting style, and it's the beginning of the game, let's give you a break" period.
You have a ship flying forward in space. You use the stylus to both click on enemies to shoot them, and to drag the ship around to move it. I found this quite challenging initially. Once I got more terennials and got a firebomb and a targeted bomb, this was much easier.
I guess these take the place of actual bosses in the levels, because the bosses themselves were much easier than bosses in games like Zelda:Minish Cap, etc.

Yahoo Avatar with Wii

2007-03-01T19:11:00.000-08:00

Hotel Dusk: Room 215

2007-02-03T07:34:00.000-08:00

Hotel Dusk: first impressions:
I'm in the middle of the 2nd chapter of this game. So far I am getting pretty immersed in it. The mystery being set up is intriguing, but while playing I usually feel like I have some goal to finish - instead of feeling overwhelmed by just wandering around and talking to people.
Puzzles are logical so far -- For example, I was supposed to hide something in my suitcase, but my suitcase key broke in the lock. The character mused about finding some wire to open it. There was a coat hanger on a rack but it was attached to the rack, so I couldn't pick it up.
I noticed a utility closet down the hall but I couldn't yet open it up -- later on I found one of the hotel workers in the linen closet across the way, and was able to get into the utility closet and find several tools in a locker (including pliers which I eventually used to cut the coat hanger).

I'm stuck now trying to put in the right combination for a file cabinet lock (the lost and found drawer in the hotel office).
(writing on Sunday) -- I was looking on the forums and caught a hint for that one- there was a memo under the file cabinet with a connect the dots puzzle on it. I had no idea what was up with that but someone on the forums alluded that it was connected to the combination. I connected the dots and was able to open the combo.
Still very sucked into the game - on Chapter 6.
Finished the game on Feb. 7 I think and passed on to Kristina at work on Feb. 8. I had started off on a second playthrough because you can get different endings, and just to avoid having to stop playing, but this is a company game so I relinquished it.

The Blackwell Legacy

2007-02-01T22:58:00.000-08:00

This game is by Dave Gilbert, who did an earlier game called The Shivah which was a mystery being solved by a rabbi.
I played this before starting my current job, and got stuck at the very beginning trying to get a password for the computer.

In this game, there is way more exposition (even in the very short demo/preview) than there is a action, but so far it has sucked me in pretty well.

The demo/preview turned out to have more long story exposition, than the beginning of the actual game did. That's good, but hopefully the demo doesn't turn people off who think it will all be that slow.

Roseangela Blackwell's aunt has just died, and she is scattering the aunt's ashes at the beginning of the game.
The preview takes us directly to the pyschiatric hospital where the aunt had been living, and a doctor tells Roseangela that she may also suffer from the dementia her aunt has. Back at her apt, she meets a mysterious ghost named Joey, and cheesy preview title text fills in the rest - that she is a medium and will be running around with Joey in each storyline, solving problems.

The actual game also begins with Roseangela scattering the ashes, but then luckily takes us right into solving a problem- the doorman filling in at her building because of a strike, doesn't recognize her, although he's been working there the whole time she's lived there.
So we then get pretty immersed right away in helping her get back into her apt.

I actually really liked it so far -- why -- I think the character-based story (and the strong matrilineal feel. You get lots of background on the main character's family. And there's something compelling to me personally maybe, when a story opens with someone tossing ashes into the ocean (brings up nosy questions like - who had died? what was the relationship? etc). The story does start very very slowly with lots of text, but I think would be interesting to both genders.

And the graphics, while only really "state of the art" for the early 90s, are awesome taken as they are. I remember playing "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" during this time period, and loving the detail on the animations. Same thing here.

Dave (Zarubin) and I were just playing Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, the SNES version, tonight on the Wii. A next-gen console playing an old-school 8-bit nostalgic game, that came out in 1991.
Just as plausible to play Blackwell Legacy on a laptop capable of doing much more!

Lifetime RSVP and other Lifetime games

2007-02-01T10:55:00.000-08:00

Lifetime RSVP

This is a simple color matching game - but it adds on the personality of matching up party guests so that they're happy talking to each other. It could have even more character, to make it seem more than the basic matching (this person's blue side should match the blue of the person next to her) but the concept is good.

Flowerpower and other simple multiplayer web games
We should look at sites like this to make our multiplayer easier to use - you just see a screen for the game, with "Match Now" at the top, basically, and it also tells you who was recently matched. This would make sense for our Match Now (the one without the ability to invite friends)

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin DS

2007-01-17T00:05:00.000-08:00

I bought this without having fully finished the previous game: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. (I'm on the last boss there and got distracted by everything else)

Here we have Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin, with a huge array of weapons, spells for Charlotte, "Dual Crush" powers for both of them, and so many outfit items that the characters usually ended up with one set for the whole game (until I found a new item that was better!)

I realized I tend to always play with the same weapon too. There's an awesome directional whip that you find somewhere, I played with that almost the whole game.
The levels seem a little less unique than the first game, maybe because I'm used to the whole concept by now.
But it's fun to solve puzzles that require both characters, and I got past the point where I would have screwed up and got the bad ending. On to the good ending!
Playing this as opposed to Lunar Knights -- it's never confusing as to how to equip something or what its stats are.
It's fun to switch between characters but I don't switch as much as I do in Lunar Knights.
The gameplay is just all around fun -- I don't have the awkwardness as in Lunar Knights. Controls amazingly, jumping around feels very fluid.
I love the detail in the artwork in this game. It's all 2d but you can see that every pixel has been well loved.

Final Fantasy III DS

2007-01-15T21:40:00.000-08:00

Jax, Milo, Arc, and Wesley...
My four adventurers in Final Fantasy III. Only Arc has his original name given in the game. The screenshot does not reflect the jobs my characters had.

I thought this game was going to be frustratingly hard because it was reviewed as an "old school RPG" or else almost boring because of the turn based battle.
But it was actually really fun and very addictive. I'm proud to say I made it through to the final Cloud of Darkness and actually beat the game!

Okami!

2007-01-08T21:50:00.000-08:00

Okami Amerasu, mother of us all...
This and Final Fantasy III are probably my two favorite games of 2006, not including the general excitement of actually having a Wii.

I actually finished this as well - almost 100 hours of gameplay overall, with trying to get various side-quests done on top of the main storyline.

You get to play as a wolf-god, who can use brush powers to actually change the environment of the game - for example, hit a shoulder button, and slash the screen with the analog stick, and you've cut a fruit down from a tree (or killed an enemy, or split open a rock...)

Beautiful cell-shaded artwork as if you are running around inside a Japanese watercolor.
And it's just plain fun to play. Not too hard, and not really too easy either (at least for me). I just love this game.

Wii! Wii! Wii!

2006-12-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

All the way home!
I did wait in line from 4:30 am to 10 am in early December to buy my Wii, but even in February people are still having trouble finding one.

Maybe went a little overboard to buy 4 controllers, but here's some memorable experiences of the Wii overall (not even going into the games).

* Elizabeth's infatuation with the Miis, and her creation of Mr. Luis Ramon.
* Tennis with Michael and Anna, and their accidentally hitting the controllers together between them! (and no harm to the controller)
* And bowling with E and Anna, comfortably waiting on the couch between turns.
* Getting all the surprise updates from Nintendo (Weather Channel, News Channel)
* The Virtual Console and how amazingly easy it is to satisfy the need to have Link to the Past ready to play in about 5 minutes from deciding to buy it!
* Sending Miis back and forth between my cousin in New Hampshire and I
* Tennis with the Malones in their well-divided living room - coffee table perpendicular to TV makes more room)

Star Fox Command

2006-08-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

Yet another in the list of "franchises I never played before playing them on the DS and now I love them!"

Have not played through this completely yet, but this is a really fun little game. It's in two parts - the "strategy" mode where you draw the paths of your ships on the touchscreen. Most missions have 4 or 5 teammates, all with differently powered ships and abilities. Then the "battles" where you are actually flying your ship around and shooting at the target enemies, flying through rings, and so on.
I was stupidly stuck here for a while when trying to shoot the missiles after flying through a set of fast moving rings. Stuck because I didn't realize you could be shooting the missile before you even get that close to it. But the spell was broken a little bit - the rest of the functional mechanics are such a joy in this game, and were challenging without being annoying.
But overall I did really like it.

Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand

2006-08-15T01:11:00.000-07:00

This was just too tempting - a built-in solar sensor in a GBA cartridge that allows you to charge up your weapon while playing in the sunshine and drag vampires out into the light to kill them, and more!
I ordered it online as it's not around in stores anymore.

I do plan to eventually finish this, and it was fun sitting outside playing the game, but stacked up against other games/books/work etc the pull was not as strong...

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

2006-08-10T00:17:00.000-07:00

Phoenix Wright really harkens back to the old-school graphic adventures (and even back to text adventures also).

The game has several cases, where you travel around to different sites to click around and investigate information and clues, before going to court and using that information you've found to find holes in the prosecution's case.
It's also just very wacky in the storyline, and they did a great job of incorporating characters throughout each case as you play through. The last case was designed specifically for the DS and so has much more use of the touch screen (for example, you "dust" for prints by dabbing dust all over the touchscreen with your stylus and then blowing it off through the DS's mic).
There's a sequel coming out in early 2007 I think.

At a party recently I met someone who is in law school to become a defense attorney, and wound up trying to explain this game - where you play as a defense attorney, Phoenix Wright.

It sounded like she was pretty entertained by it!

Played back in Sept.

Trauma Center: Under the Knife

2006-08-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

Another of the now "classic" games on the Nintendo DS, I finally got a chance to play Trauma Center (and need to return it to another co-worker).

As Dr. Derek Stiles, you play through several medical emergencies, using various tools such as a scalpel, suturing needle, etc.

As I had heard, this is pretty challenging, and maddening, however, I did get sucked into it for a little bit. I got stuck on one of the cases where you need to excise an unholy number of tumors and keep the patient alive in a very short timeframe.

Biggest interface frustration was the magnification - trying to draw a little circle where I wanted it to magnify never seemed to work.
Online faqs advised to draw it like a backwards "C" - that worked a lot better, but still it seems like it could have been a button on the screen.

World of Warcraft (10 day trial)

2006-06-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

A few months ago my willpower broke down and I downloaded the 10-day trial for World of Warcraft, or Warcrack as we have heard it called.
Also, please see this very entertaining bit of WoW machima. Billie Jean spoof!

It was fun - especially when getting into the levels of crafting skill, cooking , etc. and also exciting to finally have some reference points when everyone is talking about WOW.
I was surprised at the relatively unsocial feel at the lower levels. Compared with City of Heroes/Villains, where even a low-level newbie gets invited to team up by others, almost as soon as they venture out into Paragon City.
The low-level time of WoW felt more like a stand-alone single-player RPG, although I did get team invites a little bit. Felt like I couldn't hold my own on a team, and there are so many interesting quests to do, that I wanted to focus on my own and not have to work on all the party's quests.
In CoH/CoV, the fun for me is more in the team-ups and seeing how your powers complement everyone else's. Team leaders in COH/COV also seem to be more democratic about doing everyone's missions in turn.

But we can only have one MMORPG with a monthly fee at once, and we decided to stay with City of Heroes/Villains for the time being. (Now in the fall we canceled out of CoH/CoV as well, saving some cash.

Fury of Dracula!

2006-06-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

One of the few new board games we've bought this summer - great production (lots of well-done bits, good looking) and original gameplay, definitely not exactly like anything else we have.

In Fury of Dracula, one player is Dracula, and the other(s) play the four Hunters (Van Helsing, Jonathan and Mina Harker, etc).
The board is a very legible and beautiful map of Europe in the 1800s. (See Revolution below for a much worse European map).

The object of the game is for the 4 hunters to travel around Europe and eventually find and kill Dracula (and for Dracula to evade them as long as possible and to throw his minion vampires in their path to fight while he darts away).
But Dracula is not just standing out there on the map like the other four, he's moving secretly by playing cards in front of him (in his path).

We've played this most often with Dave as Dracula and me as the others - Dave has won in those cases. Dave's nephew played with me once, taking over 2 of the hunters, and while he wasn't able to stay for the whole game, the hunters did kill dracula at the end.

Haven't played in the last few months...

Crazy rapper at SFO

2006-05-11T16:40:00.000-07:00

I am sitting at my gate (63) for my flight to LA for E3 and Sarah's party. An Asian guy wearing a wacky white jacket just broke out into rap and he was rapping about going to LA. I am suspicious that he's also planning on going to E3.
Wonder if I'll see him there.
I wish I had the guts to take a picture!

Second Life and Exploratorium cover the eclipse

2006-04-03T01:36:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week on March 29, I was in Second Life watching the solar eclipse being broadcast by an Exploratorium webteam in Turkey, to a stadium built for this occasion in Second Life, with my friend Zalpha Alphabeta.
This picture was as late as I stayed up but you can see how dark it is in Second Life.

In this picture you see some of the others sitting and watching the eclipse. I'm in the foreground with the red skirt thing.

Zalpha is in the background with the blue hair and the rainbow colored pants.
Zalpha had also given me a dragon earlier in the evening and we flew around, but not together since I screwed up and wasn't able to keep up!

But it was pretty fun. Quite literally, "Here be dragons!"

This picture was taken earlier in the evening. It took me a while to get the Quicktime playing properly in Second Life and I never got the audio to work at all so I had it playing from the Exploratorium's streaming video on their site.
I don't think Zalpha had seen it on her screen at all.

But pretty interesting all in all if you can't physically get to the eclipse, to sit and talk to people about it in this virtual space.

Metroid Prime Hunters

2006-03-24T21:58:00.000-08:00

I was actually told directly by Nintendo to play this, so darn, I guess I gotta!!!

I was frustrated by the initial level even though it's probably painfully easy but then tonight I noticed a door I never saw before and got much further in.
I like the feeling of mystery - you kind of know why Samus is running around fighting things, but you don't have all the data, and the first person viewpoint and really awesome graphics and sound make it more "scary" than Resident Evil or City of Heroes' 3rd person fighting.
The puzzle solving is fun but not too complicated, since you only have the action of either walking over something to gather it, or scanning it for info, or shooting it (if a door or enemy).

I also enjoyed the multiplayer - we played single-cart download play the other night, which was fun.
Me: "oh, you know, I forgot to tell you, you can change into a morph ball form, like this"
Evade: "I didn't know that! Oh that is what that little ball thing was rolling around! That was you! I shot it anyway even though I didn't know what it was!"
At Tapioca Express having pearl tea before walking home (and waiting for roommate to be certain to have left the key) I played WiFi Multiplayer (and lost horribly 7 to 0 to "Cory").

Need to practice a little more or just play with friends locally.

April 2, update:
Just wanted to say, it is pretty funny to get messaged by my two bosses during the weekend because they are sending me their friend codes so that we can try to play Metroid together online and try out the Voice Chat. !!!!
My new Norton protection is protecting a little too much as I am having trouble getting my little Nintendo wifi USB thing to work again, so no play this weekend for me...

on light rail

2006-03-21T18:25:00.000-08:00

Let's see if this works!
On light rail on the way to my
company gdc party...
Exciting to show Chris round.
We're at NASA .

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

2006-03-09T02:04:00.000-08:00

This game was rated best GBA game of 2005 in one of the year-end ratings lists, I think at GameSpy... and I had never played any of the many Zelda games before either.

What was I thinking? How could I have let all of these years of Zelda go by without notice...
I played this game so much during Christmas break it's not even funny. Just enough challenge to be engaging and not enough to get frustrating (plus I cheated with a well-written FAQ by a guy named Alex).

I'm kind of stuck now and also distracted by Animal Crossing and Resident Evil and work, but it has a place in the GBA slot of my DS until I'm done!

Resident Evil DS - yes I can make it through someday!

2006-03-09T01:53:00.000-08:00

Did not expect to like this either, but it's another game I've been waiting for to try out 4 person combat multiplayer, and then got sucked into finishing the single player game.

The multiplayer is interesting in that you only see yourself as a character onscreen. Any other players appear as colored stars moving around. I can see how this makes sense, since if you had 4 bodies in the tight spaces of the game, you'd have a lot of trouble seeing them. But it looks pretty unfinished and elicits this kind of conversation while playing:
"come on, little star!"
"kill that zombie, star buddy!"

And so on. I have played a couple times with co-workers, most fun with the resident Resident Evil fan (master_of_unlocking) but the stars get distracting.

I really do like the puzzle solving, even the limited inventory and having to think about what you're carrying and how to get to the next save point with enough typewriter ribbons to save. Sometimes it even feels like having full pockets in Animal Crossing.
(dropping off health herbs in a storage chest and dropping off cool hats I just bought at Sable's in my house, in order to make room for either ammunition or some new piece of furniture, feels kind of the same somehow).
And the speed might be just right for me. Just a bit faster than Narnia DS, not as fast as a real shooter game.

Aargh and I need to be able to do a decent save file by making it past that hallway full of hunters (big nasty super-zombie monsters) without dying or being poisoned earlier by the spiders...

Dragon Quest VIII - need to return it!

2006-03-09T01:37:00.000-08:00

This is the hero of Dragon Quest VIII, for the PS2.

This is really what the screens look like in-game. They are beautiful.

I am borrowing this from a co-worker and will probably bring it back before more time is sucked away - this is a loong game, but I do like it.

It's a turn-based RPG, and I didn't think I was going to like turn-based fighting as much because I didn't like The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. Apparently this is maybe one of the flaws in LOTR: The Third Age, because I did like the turn-based fighting here, although there is a ton of it randomly occurring as you journey through the land.
I also enjoy the story, the 4 characters on your quest, the British voice acting, making cheese and other items in the alchemy pot...
It's all good so far but I need to pack and move... !

Again, this is a very famous game franchise, especially in Japan where there are all kinds of Dragon Quest media, but I had never played it until just a few weeks ago.
The enemies are pretty hilarious, there are cats that just lick their whiskers for a turn once in a while, instead of attacking...there's the puppet master who can perform an invigorating show that actually beefs up your party instead of draining them...
and there is the very famous ... SLIME:

This is an enemy?
But it's so cute! It's a blue Hershey's Kiss! Can't we take it along on the quest?
Nope, we must either attack it, or run away.
These blue slimes are pretty easy to kill ... mwa ha ha!

The metal slimes, who I have seen only once so far, will give much experience if killed, but they usually run away.

Mario Kart DS

2006-03-09T01:33:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to even bother putting a box shot here since Mario is everywhere...
but I do love this game.
I'm not playing it as much anymore with Animal Crossing and wanting to finish Resident Evil DS and Zelda: Minish Cap, but went through a bout of playing.

I also like to play Mario Kart on Wifi, especially at public WiFi points where none of my Animal Crossing friends are online and I feel silly sitting in public, playing my DS all alone.
(Of course, whether online or not, I _look_ like I'm all alone, but somehow it feels better if I can get at least one Mario Kart race in).
I usually lose online, and if I do start to win, the __ers usually quit on me!

Animal Crossing: Wild World - daily!

2006-03-09T01:24:00.000-08:00

Yet another very popular game that I had not played, before I bought it for the DS.
I watched someone at work playing the GameCube version and thought "Oh, that's cute, not sure exactly what you're supposed to do...but..."

But I am sucked into this as well, from that first taxi ride into my new town, and the life of servitude paying back my house mortgage to Tom Nook began.

It's a communication game -- you can communicate, in a way, with the animal villagers who share your town, by writing letters that they might understand (what keywords does the game recognize, anyway? mysterious...) and by talking to them in-game.
You write letters to other human characters you've created in your town - my boyfriend and I have two characters each, living in Kenmare: mine are Jax and Marie.
And perhaps the best of all, your villager can visit other towns all over the world, through the magic of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection...and trade flower-growing secrets, buy and sell, do some calm fishing or bug-catching, or just talking.

Dexter from Downtown came over a few weeks ago, admired my new Jacob's Ladder flower, and helped me come up with a less traveled place to plant it, so that it wouldn't get trampled.

So I end up every day...checking Nookington's for new stuff I haven't bought before, talking to the animals to try to get them to give me their pictures, fishing, doing some harvesting, digging up fossils to sell to the museum or donate, and sometimes leaving town for a visit.
I haven't even scratched the surface of making my own patterns...
It's a bit bizarre, but like Nintendogs, it's really not designed to be played for hours and hours at a time, and it will should continue being surprising for at least the rest of the year (unless I time-travel and spoil the surprises...)

The Urbz DS

2006-03-09T01:11:00.000-08:00

I got this used as I did not like The Urbz on PS2 that much (I got my free copy as a Maxis employee, excitedly brought it home, and then we, 2 Sims freaks, lost interest in a matter of hours).

So I had pretty low expectations for this, but I was really pleasantly surprised!
The opening was engaging, the character creation was not too unwieldy but enough to make you feel like this is a custom character.
I think they did a great job with the missions - eventually moving you from just hanging out on the top of one building, to being able to roam all over the city.
You usually have various missions in different states of completion, making the game feel much busier.
Keeping needs fulfilled was a bit more of a pain here but it pushes you on a lot of the time because you get caught in the middle of something, needing to sleep or go to the bathroom, so then you just want to keep playing longer to see what happens when that mission is done.

I liked the conversation system here much much better than in Sims 2 DS.

I did get annoyed looking for people I needed to talk to (reminds me now of looking for animals in Animal Crossing who are not in their houses or walking around). Half the time I would be too late once I did finally find them.
But then I found out I could call people on the phone and they would tell me where they were going to be, which made the whole thing a lot less random.

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - soul stealing for sunpath

2006-03-09T01:02:00.000-08:00

Yet another game franchise I had never played at all is Castlevania, and this was a good one to start with.

I sucked at the bosses in the beginning and had to get help on the first one, but I think I'm at least 30% of the way done with the game now and have been charging along (until other stuff came up to distract me).

The collection mechanic with the souls makes it much more interesting to run around and kill all these enemies, level up, buy new weapons, etc. The art is awesome, the sound and music immersive. I didn't even mind the touch screen "trace a seal before you can kill the boss" part, as it wasn't that hard for me. It's getting to the part where you're allowed to do the seal, that's hard for me.
I still don't have the Bat Company soul so I can't fly around, so there must be a lot more of this game left. I resist the strategy guide. I resist!

Advance Wars Dual Strike - love it!

2006-03-09T00:53:00.000-08:00

I feel like I have been following a path prescribed by Nintendo for people who buy a DS and Nintendogs and then want more!

I read a bunch of reviews all raving about Advance Wars: Dual Strike... I still remember going to buy it at Best Buy and thinking hmm... is this really going to be fun? or is this a gamble.
It's like candy. Not just in the colorful tanks, ships, little mech soldiers, and other vehicles, but it's hella addictive to beat down the AI in the single-player campaigns
(if you can... I am in the middle of a battle where I have 3 armies against one enemy army and a satellite. I had to fire 9 missiles at the satellite in less than an hour to take it down, but the enemy keeps pounding away at me until I lose! Next time, Black Hole Army!)

We also love the multiplayer "hot seat." Even though this is a 1-DS household, we can still challenge each other to a good game of Advance Wars, and I am much better against my gaming strategy boyfriend than I thought.
A surefire thing for long plane trips together if we keep the DS charged. (or of course bring the books.)

City of Heroes, Anniversary!

2006-03-09T00:40:00.000-08:00

A whole year of playing City of Heroes with Urso Brunov,
who is based on the hero of a children's book by Brian Jacques. (See book blog)

Urso Brunov now has a villainous counterpart by the name of, what else, Urso Brutov!
(picture coming...)

City of Heroes is a very fun and time-sucking MMORPG in the comic book superhero genre. I, and especially my boyfriend, are "altaholics" meaning that we don't have a character above level 30 (max is 50) but all 88 character slots (before City of Villains) were full.
I think we now have the extra 44 full too, have not checked.
It's very addicting to start up a new character with a new set of powers, and the game does a great job of sucking you in with the initial few missions:

"Finished my first mission... ding! Wow, I leveled up, now I get a new power... people are asking me to join their team..."
I resisted this game for 3 months - it was a birthday present for boyfriend, but I made the Urso character around my birthday last year and we're still playing.
I also have the villainous "Empress Jadis," an homage to Narnia. Of course, she has ice powers, but I could not find a white robe for her costume.

Goldeneye: Rogue Agent DS... not a keeper

2006-03-09T00:25:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big first person shooter fan anyway, and apparently this game wasn't much fun in the original PS2 version, but I wanted to see what the multiplayer was like.
I decided to practice in single player first so I would not be lame running around in multiplayer shooting badly.
I had so much trouble with the controls that I got very frustrated initially. This was before I had discovered the magic of the thumb strap thingie for targeting using the touchscreen, and had thought I was stuck with using the stylus (which was very hard while moving with the Control Pad) or using the ABXY buttons to aim.
I started it up again after hearing about the thumb strap, and was at least able to get through the opening level.
Then I realized I didn't really care what happens to the Rogue Agent... and I would never be able to do very well in multiplayer, and decided to wait for Metroid Prime Hunters. Popped in one of the many other awesome DS games instead...

The DS and the Nintendogs' Demise....

2006-03-09T00:14:00.000-08:00

This is not my DS and I don't have this game (yet) but it's a nice presentation! (thank you Grandma Hardcore!)
I love the DS and I've enjoyed most of the games I've played (except for the Sims 2, as mentioned, and also Goldeneye: Rogue Agent.)

I bought a blue DS in the fall a few weeks after Nintendogs came out and I could hear people all over the office at work calling to their dogs and the joyful barks in reply. A bit stereotypically although I had no professional reason to own a DS at that time, I got the DS and Nintendogs...

I had fun with my dogs - it was awesome, I rode BART more often and I loved to walk my dogs, Chekhov and Stormy, every day. They even found the helicopter toy on one of their walks, so I could dive bomb them with it mercilessly.
Chekhov was the best trained...
"was" you say? Why is that in the past tense?
Rest in Peace, my poor Nintendogs, who are no more after the save data in my cart decided to give up the ghost.
The game is now entertaining my co-worker and her fiancee...

Sigh...

The Sims 2 DS - surprisingly not fun

2006-03-08T23:27:00.000-08:00

This is the first post of this new blog not because I like this game, because I don't.

It's because this post will soon be at the very bottom of the list, as has happened to the wonderful Finn Family Moomintroll on my book blog.

You'd think I would have loved this game, having worked on the PC version of Sims 2 and its first expansion pack, and maybe I should play it again now that I am addicted to Animal Crossing, which also has a real-time clock, but is so much better.

It just didn't feel like a Sims game to me. I think I was spoiled by the Urbz DS which I had just played and liked much better.
I really liked the "manage a hotel" theme, but I never got hooked in because it never felt immediate enough with the real-time clock.
For example, I had a ton of guests in my hotel wanting to check in, but I couldn't check them in because there wasn't an empty room. I try to build an empty room and it did say it would be ready in 8 hours, but did not realize this is 8 real-time hours! And the game wasn't compelling enough really to keep trying.

One of the most annoying things was conversation with other characters. In Urbz DS and to a lesser extent in the PC version of Sims 2, you actually feel like you need to choose what "topic" you talk about with certain Sims, or they will get mad, you lose relationship points with them, etc. They actually feel more like real people and you find yourself thinking,
"Ok, here is So and So, what were they interested in? OK, I'll talk to them about that..."

In this game, you need to watch the animation of the person you're talking to, and then just pick one of 3 responses (calm them down, for example, was one of them).
It seemed not very intuitive to match the mood of the person with the right response animation, and if you made a mistake, you could not rectify it....

I also thought the initial tasks to do, such as finding someone out in the desert and consoling them, just weren't that fun. It was raining in the desert, which seemed odd, and made me wonder if this was put in mainly because we could not have rain in the PC version?

And vacuuming....