The best thing Patapon creator Hiroyuki Kotani says in his new interview with Gamasutra is a simple lesson I wish more developers would learn:
In my previous career as a teacher, what I learned is that if my students are happy, they would learn more; so, we had to praise them rather than scolding them. So, that’s the biggest hint I got for the creation of games: I have to make the users happier, so they would feel like they are encouraged to go to the next stage.
As an example: one of the keys to Rock Band‘s success compared to Harmonix’s earlier rhythm games like Amplitude and Frequency wasn’t just the real-world fantasy of its plastic peripherals, but the subtle but constant reinforcement of just how brilliant you’re doing, what a fantastic rock star you actually are, when the in-game audience cheers your star-power successes and sings along to ‘your’ vocals when the full band’s maxing out their meters.
From the MTV owned Country Music Television blog (and therefore very probably not empty conjecture!), the first real word of Rock Band branching out from its, well, rock roots with the first all-country DLC:
Just wait until Dec 16. That’s when Rock Band will add five country songs to its downloadable content for PlayStation3 and XBOX 360… This bundle’s going to have [Dierks Bentley], plus Brad Paisley, Brooks & Dunn, Miranda Lambert and the Dixie Chicks.
Say what you will about the tricky mashup of four spike-and-leather be-goth’d members working their way through a cover of my grandmother’s favorite hits, but more diversity is always a very good thing, especially if it spurs more back-catalog digging (‘Ring of Fire’ being a new Offworld hit in iNiS’s karaoke game Lips).
Not only that, but it’s pointed me toward the fact that Vectrex.biz’s Richard Hutchinson, creator of the first flashcart for 80s home vectorbeam console Vectrex (which I’d be all over if I didn’t already own Sean Kelly’s excellent 60 game multicart) has also produced a flashcart for the Virtual Boy. The cart currently appears to be sold out, though, so it looks like I’m going to have to wait to emerge again from those long VB nights with that trademark panda-eyed visor-line around my face.
There’s cause for celebration all around for the 2nd anniversary of Half-Life 2 user-tomfoolery-enabler Garry’s Mod: he’s just revealed that he’s sold well over 300,000 copies of the mod (which, as the bloggers with calculators have deduced, works out to over $3 million thus far), and found stardom so rich he has accidentally shared airplane-food-vomit stories with Junction Point’s Warren Spector.
Ah, this is an idea so good I’m a little ashamed I didn’t think of it first: LittleBigPlanet fan site LittleBigPlanetoid has started curating sticker packs from designers and illustrators and putting together in-game levels where players can collect them. Brighton-based illustrator Matt Buchanan drew the first such pack, with submissions that perfectly bill the mood of the game.
The current catch is that, with a patch to allow picture imports straight off the PS3 not yet available, the sticker quality isn’t quite up to snuff, but Planetoid promises the levels will be reworked when the game allows.
Apparently not one to take the release of the second Patapon game sitting down (yuk), Rolito has revealed that Medicom is expanding their licensed toy series from the previously shown Bearbrick to this stand-ee plush warrior. I’m completely sold (read: a sucker), but listen, Medicom: what the world really needs is a sound-activated Patapon that lets you tap a rhythm and have it respond in turn. Isn’t it obvious?
With my Space Invaders enthusiasm in full swing now that Get Even has finally been released, I was doubly pleased to see Final Invader DX, an indie competition submission that, like Get Even, tells the tale from an Invader’s perspective. This time it’s a traitorous octo-invader who steals top secret plans and defects to Earth not wanting to take a suicide mission from an overzealous commander.
The best part: a vaguely Mr. Driller/Elevator Action-esque second act that sees the invader working his way down through caverns to get to the UFO (and the perfectly timed “thank you but” message just as you think you’ve reached the end), and the Darius style warning messages which ChangeV complains no one noticed, but we did, ChangeV, we did.
The primary reason I’m excited for Spike TV’s forthcoming Video Game Awards show? Even apart from the fact that I returned to serve as one of its judges, the ceremony will include the first new look in over a year at DoubleFine’s black metal adventure Brütal Legend, the sophomore game from the studio behind Psychonauts, headed by former LucasArts designer Tim Schafer.
That year long wait has been a tumultuous one: as with the Ghostbusters game, the Vivendi/Activision merger put the future of the game in some jeopardy, and its new publisher is still not yet known. Schafer went so far as to devise an encoded threat level system to let people know where the game stands, which he’s just raised to Haunted Sandalwood, or “omg I think there may be some news this month,” which we’re going to go ahead and guess will come alongside the new video.
Jack Black — who plays Brütal Legend‘s hessian lead — will host the awards show, which will also see appearances by Will Wright, Hideo Kojima, Cliff Bleszinski, Fallout 3 producer Todd Howard, and LittleBigPlanet‘s Alex Evans. Spike TV will air the show live Sunday, December 14 At 9:00 PM ET.
Gamasutra notes that Game Informer magazine has run life to date retail sales for Valve’s Half-Life franchise, and even not counting units sold through its Steam service (keeping those figures traditionally tightly held), the numbers are duly impressive:
Half-Life – 9.3 million Half-Life: Opposing Force – 1.1 million Half-Life: Blue Shift – 800,000
Counter-Strike – 4.2 million Counter-Strike: Condition Zero – 2.9 million Counter Strike: Source – 2.1 million Counter-Strike [Xbox] – 1.5 million
Half-Life 2 – 6.5 million Half-Life 2: Episode One – 1.4 million
The Orange Box – 3 million
Left 4 Dead – 3.6-3.9 million (projected)
As Gamasutra points out, while the figures on their face would suggest a downward trend in sales for each new volume of the game, the 2004 release of Half-Life 2 was the first to be released simultaneously at retail and via Steam.
There’s nothing about 2008 that I’ll remember more fondly than the bold success of independent games developers. Based on the past couple of years, and the guiding lights of companies like Introversion, I had been anticipating some positive trends for 2008, but things really started to clarify at February’s San Francisco GDC. The signs were all there: 2008 was going to be a crucial year for the indie gaming scene.
It’s fair to say that the Independent Game Summit was brimming with energy, and the independent developers had more to say – and more to be happy about – than any of the scores of well-paid big-studio professionals who were strolling lackadaisically around the convention centre halls. In fact, seeing games like World of Goo and Fez in motion was pretty unsettling: they were so imaginative, and so cogent, that the idea of their being built up by two man teams seemed absurd. If I were a developer working in a big studio game, I would have been rethinking my life choices around that time. (more…)
