Character names in games

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

Amazon List - Puzzle DS games for adult gamer

DS games for Puzzle-loving adult gamer

to remember for future

Nintendo most successful publisher of decade

Nintendo most successful game publisher of the decade!

Female Gaming Blogs list (from Blogher-SuperJive)

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)

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!

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"

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

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

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

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

Wandering Willows

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

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

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

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

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?

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.