Blogs - ShawnGordon

A question that has plagued the gaming community for over a decade (maybe more): Are video games art?

The question of whether video games are art has been answered often times in the wrong manner primarily by attempting to explain why video games are art; a question never asked. Why implies causality and that a pro or con has already been established. It has yet to be determined that they’re art at all or simply a manifestation of the arts.

In order for it to be truly answered one must first establish that video games either are or are not art by detailing how and in what sense; an established standard by which to go from.

Are they art? They might be, but it depends on how art is viewed and whether or not the person asking is willing to comply with semantic terms and technical definition. Merriam-Webster defines art as a couple of things:

Art (n): decorative or illustrative elements in printed matter; the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects.

Art (adj): produced as an artistic effort or for decorative purposes.

It becomes easy to see how and why people commonly use art interchangeably with what they really mean: artistic; the show of skill in arrangement or execution. Wikipedia lumps the definition, blurring the line between that state of being and act of doing or guashing over the defining principles of the arts and confusing them with art, giving the impression that they are one and the same.

From Wikipedia:

Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings.

Enter the strange duality that is ‘a definition’. On one hand we have Wikipedia, the web 2.0, “perception is context”, hive mind social source definition that more or less easily argues the pro side of video games are art with a blanketed statement. On the other hand we have the more hardlined semantic, archaic dictionary that could argue no, video games are not art with detailed terms, and as they say ‘the devil is in the details’. The Wikipedia entry more closely relates to the adjective of art rather than the noun; it’s describing what art is as a series of actions not results and when the topic of video games as art comes up it is talked about not as an action but as an end result of the actions. The fact is that Wikipedia’s ‘perception is context’ holds no water because if perception was context then street magicians like David Blaine would truly wield untold power from the great beyond rather than David Blaine being a regular guy with a gaff deck and very adept at slight of hand and illusions.

Kellee Santiago made a fair attempt at trying to convince people in a TEDxUSC lecture that video games were in fact, art. In doing so she relayed that cave paintings were little more than chicken scratch, writing was originally for tallying taxes, and singing originated as something like giving a warning of a wild animal attack. While all of this may be true, what she failed to consider was that she had removed context of the time period while comparing and contrasting past and present technology. In other words, she defined games as art on the idea that evolving technology empowered the object as art rather than the process as art. Perhaps in 30 years when we finally get our flying cars and jetpacks we can look back on Santiago and the ‘art’ game she helped develop (Flower) and remove it from being called ‘art’ on the premise that the tools and technology available had become archaic compared to those of the future. Her point in the end however was that art evolves, and over time things manifest as art that had not previously been art. For this to be true in a logical sense the inverse must also be true and things that are now art can one day not be art. It was a 15 minute lecture that sat opposite the opinion of Roger Ebert: “Games can never be art”.

Another way to look upon this is the art of writing as it pertains to me as a writer. I’ve been asked in both positive and negative contexts whether or not I consider myself a writer (though I know they intend to ask if I feel I’m a good writer). The answer is simply that I do write and in that sense, yes as an adjective I am a writer – I partake in the activity of writing. I wish to engage an audience and move them with the words they read and often times succeed in either making the audience happy, angry, fearful, annoyed, and a number of other planned emotions while also effectively conveying my intended point; therefore when I achieve my goal I feel I have written well or have been a ‘good writer’. As a noun however, I am not. I do not possess the technical skills and training, nor have I held a professional post as one who writes. Another term for the type of writer I can be considered is ‘citizen journalist’. And again, a prime example of the easily transposed definition of terms manifests.

So, the question lingers – Are video games art?

And so there was a tale of four chairs. Apparently the Republic of Fritz Hansen feels their all plastic chair here is worth almost $800 (641 Euros to be exact). Honestly, it’s not much to look at and while I’m sure that someone somewhere spent a great deal of time coordinating certain angles and finally found an excuse to pull out their French Curve for the first time since college. The chair sums up to be simply a cheap looking chair geared towards something that anyone living in this economy can scarcely afford; to sit on their ass . Spacify shares a similar price philosophy with a wooden brace corner chair that looks rather drab and uncomfortable, yet classy and successfully captures the existing monotony of contemporary furniture and as though someone thought “hey, contemporary furniture is getting too dynamic, lets kick it up a notch with a double dose of yawn” . On the other hand, IKEA and Walmart have similarly priced arm chairs that don’t indicate the buyer has money to burn but they’re functional and able to conform to a number of styles; utilitarian ‘light’ if you will. The point is that the justification for the expensive chairs lies within how readily someone accepts them as not a chair but art or how ridiculously stupid someone tends to be with money and disregards the impulse buy warning mechanism of their inner pauper. Irrespective, they’re chairs and will always be chairs. No matter how well designed they are, how much thought and passion went into getting the curves just right or if it embraces an obscure philosophy of a great architect long dead who lived in the golden age of whatever – they’re chairs, end of story.

Being utilitarian is possibly the biggest detriment to the case of video games being art, and an aspect that everyone tends to overlook. Are video games utilitarian? Of course they are. When a player loses at a game and throws a tantrum, they’re reminded to keep calm, that it’s what? only a game. Time and time again gamers profess how games are a much needed item in their lives, how they cannot wait for a title to release or express how without video games an aspect of their lives would be empty.

But can something be both a utensil and art? That largely depends upon if one believes that Uncharted and Gears of War should cost more than Dark Void. Look at the Wii, whose games run $10 less than titles on XB360 and PS3. They don’t cost less because they’re not as ‘good’ or less of a work of ‘art’. They’re less expensive because they cost less to produce, manufacture, distribute and because the technological capabilities of the system for which they are deployed is subpar compared to other consoles of the same generation. Which brings us to the next point of how games are not art.

Born in 1977, I clearly remember the evolution of gaming from the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision consoles onward, so in the past they were needed in the same way that methadone clinics are ‘needed’ to junkies. Today its a different story, video games generate a lot of revenue, bring groups of people closer together by successfully integrating into the day to day lives of a growing global majority, and have become a staple manner of spending quality time with members of one’s family. They are the essential new media of a modern evolving world that have untold potential as well as valid and proven usefulness in a high functioning society.

One can easily find a number of opinion articles written arguing the value of video games as tools with more factual evidence to back the opinion than can be had to back the argument that video games as art. Video games have been used as training tools for the military and as learning aids in schools for people of all ages and as a prime example of the latter titles like Oregon Trail, Reader Rabbit and Math Blaster were staple installed programs at elementary schools as far back as the late 80′s. Even websites like starfall.com and abcya.com incorporate a video game like environment to encourage learning among young children. Even in Santiago’s lecture she shows video of a game used as a tool to explore the mechanics of game design and other core concepts.

What is a fork with 20 tines? a fork. What is a fork with 2 tines? a fork. What is a fork with 0 tines? useless. Art like the fork, isn’t greater than the sum of its parts.

Kazimir Malevic - Black Square, 1913

Pablo Picasso - Suzanne Bloch, 1904

Kazimir Malevic painted Black Square, an example of minimalism, abstraction and in some cases cubism in 1913. Conversely Pablo Picasso painted a portrait of Suzanne Bloch, considered the last important work of ‘The Blue Period” in 1904. Picasso’s work is easily identifiable as a person, probably someone specific if one had lived in the time and location. Is one of these more art than the other or are they equally but separately art? They’re equally art of different forms using the same process, methods and tools so stating that one is art and the other isn’t doesn’t work because the end result is the same.

Bonsai Tree

"Halo" game

Taking it a step further and with focus on not the end result but the process we see a Bonsai Tree, which takes many years to shape, train, and condition. In a moment it can all be undone by a sloppy cut, ill-timed prune, or momentary neglect. The end result isn’t ‘art’ but the process to achieve the desired goal is an art. Likewise we see the video game Halo. Neglect misses deadlines, ill-timed content pruning leaves story holes, sloppy programming results in glitches. The process of creation is an art and the end result is even artistic in nature, but not technically art.

Most arts have subject matter (the Art of Bonsai has bonsai as its subject, for example), a nature of working, and a goal. Design, however, is an art that has no subject matter. Designers make their own subject matter, or are given it. We tend to treat subject matter too seriously and it prevents us from seeing the art or enables us to misinterpret an art as art.

With that it becomes important to understand the difference between art and an art, and to some degree of art. The Oxford dictionary, the self described foremost authority on the English language reads:

An art is a habit of thinking, doing, or making that demonstrates systematic discipline based on principles.

This then becomes tied directly to ‘the arts’.

The arts are the various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, and drama.

An art is not just a series or procedures or methods and there can be many methods inside an art, but art gives strategic purpose to methods.

Going back the the Bonsai tree, one wouldn’t consider the tree itself ‘art’, but would consider the cultivation of it artistic, the methods of cultivation an art, or work of art (which is not itself art but a produced from it). How then are video games any different? They’re not, therefore - not art.

NOTE:

This isn’t meant to open a elitist debate to trash art work or artistic efforts. If you’re compelled to do that then stick to places like humhum and certain sections of theroot42 – you’ll get your elitist fix there. This was written with the intended gamer audience in mind, not to be some elitist manifesto directed at art students too proud to admit that not everything is art or judge only a small handful of what snobbish arbitrary abstraction ‘they‘ do is art nor is it my way of stating that I decide what is and is not art – that’s just silly.

Disappointment is a part of life. In fact, most things in reality are fairly disappointing which is why many people turn to video games. They’re a kind of trap door that leads to a different world. In this world players get to experience a sense of value and worth not found to the same degree in the real world. As time goes by, the depravity and disappointments of the real world have begun to appear in the virtual game world that many of us find refuge.

This is a list of games that had a world of potential but the developers failed us in making a truly remarkable title worthy of the praise they’ve been given. Damn them.

Enough time has passed since this game has hit shelves that the mere thought of frowning in its direction shouldn’t make anyone have a nervous breakdown and act like a mentally deficient chimpanzee, so MW2 starts the list of games that could have been a terrific game, but wasn’t on all fronts. One should wonder whether or not MW2 is even a game at all or more of a conglomerate of concepts forming little more than a playable tech demo that can be summed up with “blow shit up with other people just because you can”. With that comes to mind the idea that just because something can be done mean that it should be done. With the right focus on the entirely wrong parts of the game and the wrong focus on the right parts, this game enraptured people with the flashy visuals in one hand and brass knuckle sucker punched them in the groin with the other.

Despite being a relatively generic shooter with an innocuous story, MW2 had massive amounts of potential. It took the multiplayer aspects that made Halo hyper popular and integrated realistic weapons and settings that players could better relate to very quickly. It enjoyed being part of the shooter genre that moved away from the tired WWII setting and personal taste aside (I abhor the game), there were many merits to the title that were worthy of praise. It did capture a fast paced and sometimes disorganized mess that occurs in a combat situation. It did a great job of making the player ‘feel’ the betrayal at the climax of the game, and a few other points such as good lighting and textures helped draw players into the surroundings. All of the finer points were well done, but the parts that fell apart contributed to the game being a technical implosion that most fans seem to survive, adapt and cope with.

Sure, it entertained millions of people as noted by its record setting sales numbers. It also received a very high number of complaints and was the source of one of the most controversial debates since the late 80s playground battles between Sega and Nintendo loyalists. To start, the game had some of the worst balance mechanics and contained numerous exploits and bugs of an FPS. For a game allegedly costing $40-50 million to produce and a claimed $200 million to market, it defies logic as to how or why the caliber of bugs present weaseled into the final retail copy and why they were present for as long; even the patches needed patches. Many bugs and exploits completely sapped the fun out of the multiplayer mode of the game for most.

When it came to the single player campaign was like losing ones virginity to another virgin; it’s alarmingly shorter than anticipated, wastes a lot of time talking about it rather than actually doing it, and the post coital realization that 98% of what other people tell you about it is total bullshit – all for what really amounts to 15 minutes of furious fondling followed by 5 minutes of wet tapping sounds. The characters were largely irrelevant and undeveloped to have any intrinsic value and while there were some clear points attempting to come to the surface, they were too deeply embedded in the visual hyperbole to have credible impact on the player and the story.

Should the game have the accolades it did? Maybe to some but I don’t believe it was above a 6 out of 10 because in retrospect the game was largely unpolished, not enough thought was given to conveying an idea and too many problems arose from the glitches to be looked upon as something a team of intelligent individuals sat and honestly gave a good hard look at, but lots of people found themselves herded into the magnificence maleficence and led to believe that they’d be uncool if they didn’t spend the money on a 6 hour tour.

Next time, a few extra months spread between conceptualizing the story and testing the multilayer aspects of the game before releasing it to public may do a world of good to a franchise I’ve grown to unabashedly snub.

The metric by which almost all other RPG titles are compared, the Final Fantasy franchise manages to reinvent itself while simultaneously borrowing bits and pieces of itself in various arrangements. The latest in the series however, left a lot of fans disappointed. Where Square went wrong with FF13 was not in the fact that they changed the mechanics, but that they changed too many mechanics too abruptly for too many people with little warning.

Square isn’t a company with the cleanest record though. The Last Remnant, Neir, Bouncer, Bahamaut Lagoon, and a large handful of other games developed, produced or published by Square Enix haven’t done much more than become a joke, but their one trump card is Final Fantasy. So what if Square is a one trick pony when its one helluva trick?

Normally, I don’t find myself on the side of the popular ideas, especially when it comes to what boils down to ‘perception is context’, but in the case of Final Fantasy 13 if the idea is to get a majority of people involved and interested then what a majority of people want to play and their notion of what to expect has to be taken into deep consideration. When Square set out to make the game they voiced the idea that they’d be bringing in some new ideas to make the game unlike any other Final Fantasy and of course there was also the huge flap over the graphics between the PS3 and XB360 versions (which for some odd reason still rages on in certain circles). And, Square kept good on their word; Final Fantasy was unlike most any other Final Fantasy before it. The changes were that some staple elements usually found in the Final Fantasy series that turned up missing in action and despite the justifications for their absence, the game ultimately suffered in context to appeal and playability making for a largely dissatisfying experience by many. Personally, I enjoyed the game and I understood the changes, their reason for change and have previously made an appeal as to why people shouldn’t be so disappointed however, I also understand where and why people are left feeling as though the game didn’t live up to the expectations of the Square Enix RPG battle standard and I shudder to think how this would have played out had Sonic Team not completely ruined and diluted the Phantasy Star, franchise more than a decade ago.

Final Fantasy disappointed not in any other way than they went off the beaten path in an attempt to reignite interest in a franchise that has run strong for over 20 years. Conventional wisdom dictates that if it isn’t broken, then one doesn’t make an attempt to fix it. Square had the opportunity of a lifetime; to bring a massive RPG of epic proportions to a next generation console, the likes anyone had yet to do on unprecedented scales. Instead they effectively removed the core elements that attracted people to the game to begin and in one fell risky swoop succeeded in alienating large portions of a would-be fresh new audience on flagship consoles and created both a small PR mess and credibility issues and ruined their track record of having landmark first entries on new consoles. In hindsight using core elements as the sacrificial lamb was a stupid move on their part and while people may have bemoaned more of the same when it comes to Final Fantasy, the audience playing the game wouldn’t have decreased.

Rockstar set out to recapture audiences with what was more or less GTA in the west. Players could choose to turn the main characters life around or to continue being a bad guy – but that’s Rockstar’s M.O. 90% of the time. The game truly offers nothing new to any aspect of their game line up save for a really big environment. It seems that Rockstar thinks that over time what gamers really want is a bigger sandbox, not more sand.

The main character John feels like a bonafide badass, and normally games overplay the abilities of the main character making them feel too powerful or putting them in a world with enemies that are equally powerful as a balance that ultimately makes everything not part of the story feel weak and frail, or illogically indestructible. RDR overcomes this with a simple timeline. The game spans over a period of years, and like TV’s 24 the impact of events isn’t diminished by the observation that overall they’re sporadic. Rockstar has always done a pretty good job at telling an entertaining story and RDR is no exception, but the disappointment of RDR comes in the form of horrible animation and voice acting. Great attention was placed on the environment and models, but not enough was really placed on the clunky control mechanics and the unfit voices.

John sounds like Norm MacDonald formerly of SNL while his visual representation begs for something more gruff and deep… like Christian Bale (not that Bale sounded like he looked in 3:10 to Yuma either…), or Gerrard Butler. Provided no one says anything, the game pretty much pulls players in, most of the other character voices don’t fit too well either and in the end it serves to remove players from the moment.

The other disappointing aspect of the game really has little to do with the game itself but the expectations and the critical acclaim. The expectations were set so low for this game that its average quality was received as well above average. Many of the elements in the game are common place among other games of today; the lighting, the cut-scenes, the story telling method, the interaction… nothing outside of a few detailed models were anything that a fair number of other games have been living up to for a few years.

Chris Kohler of wired.com put it best when he wrote:

Some major plot revelations later in the game introduce a whole universe of possible explanations. And why not, when we know the main character is just making it all up as he goes along? When presented with an infinite number of possible resolutions, any answer is going to feel arbitrary.

Alan Wake, the name of both the game and main character is more or less a poorly done survival horror / 3rd person shooter wrapped in a handful of a few Stephen King novels and David Lynch movies; one might argue that the plot-line is entirely a homage to them both. Unfortunately to write out this homage someone picked an author to the low technical caliber of Stephanie Meyer when the high technical caliber of JK Rowling was called for and talked about. It’s like being promised a new car for your birthday and then getting a used bicycle instead.

The game opens with what ends up being more of an excuse than a reason:

Stephen King once wrote that nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations. They’re antithetical to the poetry of fear. In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why. But there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.

In the literary world where the reader must imagine the surroundings and suppose the purpose behind actions the above statement is fairly true, particularly in the case of surreal situations commonly written about by HP Lovecraft or Clive Barker (though they both had a tendency to eventually explain things), but in a video game where the player must engage and interact in a predetermined fashion and format a lack of explanation turns ‘fun’ into ‘arbitrary’ and ‘moot’. Take for example the game’s risk/reward mechanic. It’s a weak systematic hoarding set up with a coating of ‘engage or retreat’ questions as players go from place to place in a linear fashion fighting off enemies no creepier than a thug with a pipe wrench in the woods. The actual fear factor of the game relies on a players’ constitution and imagination. Again, this is why the above Stephen King statement really only works within the literary world; if you present the audience with an image that directs, there is little room for imagination without being contradictory or confusing overall.

For Alan Wake to have gone from ‘okay’ to ‘must buy’ serious work needed to be put into the way the story unfolded and the meshing of the characters into their environment. The end of the game answered questions most players never asked and made players ask questions that the answers contradicted the actions. A good book and a good story will encourage players to ask questions that pertain to the story rather than question the integrity of it.

ModNation Racers is a grab bag of both good and bad things in terms of execution. On the good side the game is colorful, engaging and highly approachable no matter the reason for buying the title. As a kart racing game, MNR isn’t bad. It’s not great, but it’s not bad; it squarely rests somewhere between ‘alright’ and ‘good’ being as entertaining as Mario Kart without being too sophomoric. The ‘rubber band’ method of keeping pressure on players when facing the AI is and has always been irksome for many and tends to make players feel as though they’re at a distinct disadvantage (technically, they are), but it retains the challenge in the races irrespective how how ‘good’ one is at the game. On the bad side the tools given while not complicated, fail to meet let alone set a standard and the AI is a autonomous collective that will ignore itself rather than separate individuals trying to win independently, in other words if players are set to come in place 1-3, they can expect a perfectly timed 3rd tier attack 5-10 seconds before crossing the finish line with the AI ‘rubber banding’ ahead of them but if the AI is set to be at the podium the game doesn’t react in a similar fashion – there are some serious balance issues.

Like Little Big Planet before it, MNR promotes user generated content with a small degree of rights control over said content (players can bar others from ‘remixing’ an uploaded creation). The tools to create content are intuitive, practical, and robust. On the other hand they’re also buggy, especially in terms of track creation. Two major bugs I’ve personally run into more than once:

• The AI is permitted to deviate from a breadcrumb path without being penalized. Players who attempt to deviate from the track receive the ‘off track’ notification and the red MRC screen. In the rare event that the AI is barred from deviating, instead of respawning at their point of deviation, they respawn at the point they would have returned to the track had they not been penalized.
• Placing a jump on a track high above perpendicular, lower section of track will at times result in an “illegal shortcut” penalty, the red MRC screen and placement before illegal shortcut once so as to penalize the player a second time before eventually being reset after the penalty area . It is understood that there could be a flaw in the track design that causes the error and it can be written off as a user created error, but to return players to a point to recreate the penalty is plain stupid.
• When paving, the game asks if the player would like to “auto populate” their created track. The tool is sort of an ‘all or nothing’ feature and if the player opts to place props manually, using the auto-populate feature will undo the design in place by players. There’s no option to auto populate on the track or by the track – it just does both and in the course of that action will undo pave styles, bridges, fences, tunnels, traps, boosts, weapon pods, etc. The tool meant to make creation the absolute easiest is also the tool that makes things the most frustrating and devolved.

That said, the tools needed some serious play testing and it is obvious that they didn’t get some much needed attention. In the case of MNR, United Front Games did well in giving players a toolbox full of tools to make a huge assortment of things. The problem is that the toolbox is full of tools with a single purpose, most of which have a limited scope and fragile mechanics despite their potential. This is especially disappointing given that the driving point behind the game’s production value and core philosophy is summed up and shared verbatim with LBP – “Play, Create, Share”, a game that is heralded as ‘the’ example of what a UGC game can be. Don’t take it wrong, user generated content tools have made tremendous strides over the past few years (anyone remember the contravention that was “RPG maker” on the PS2? or how about the PC toolset for Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2?), but it seems that putting focus on debugging core aspects of a game that are integral to extended playability and user interactivity would be paramount. Had these frustrating and cumbersome bugs and balance issues been addressed prior to retail release, MNR would be a groundbreaking title worth of sharing the spotlight with LBP rather than feel like an expensive proof of concept . United Front Games will be remembered for implementing a handful of ideas in one place like never before on a console (until LBP2), but another studio will possibly be remembered for getting it right since UFG didn’t.

As a child my parents used positive reinforcement and rewarded me when I received good grades in school. That is until I got into 6th grade at which point a shift to reality began taking place. I was walking back from the mailbox one summer afternoon with my final 5th grade report card in hand, excited at the idea that I be getting some new Nintendo game as a reward if I could maintain a B+ average. I handed it to my mother and after looking it over she placed it on the kitchen table for what I assumed was to the point of letting my father look it over when he got home from work. When he got home he looked it over, signed it and put it in his room. I was confused as to why we didn’t go get a game that night, but it wasn’t Friday so maybe we were going to go when dad got paid.

Friday came and went so finally Saturday I asked my mother about it. From across the kitchen table between sips of hot coffee she explained “You did what was expected, nothing more,” she continued after a pause to sip coffee, “The teacher won’t give you points for spelling words correctly on a paper but will take them from you for spelling them incorrectly because you’re at a point that you’re expected to know how to spell. There’s no extra bonuses in life for doing what is expected or promised, only penalties when you don’t.”

In hindsight she’s absolutely right; who rewards the mailman for delivering the mail? No one because that’s what they’re supposed to do; they are part of a delivery service that we pay for and having paid for it we have a set standard expectation. We expect that the mailperson will take the mail from the box at the end of the driveway and take it to where it goes. If it gets to the right place in an acceptable time frame nobody jumps from behind a bush and pats them on the back. The game industry is very similar to the service industry in that they’re coming to the consumer with a product and a service making promises to a group of people with a set of expectations based upon those promises and history of interaction. When they fail to keep those promises I am not compelled to reward them with anything but try to withhold from them and if they perform only on average then I’m disinclined to reward them with anything above and beyond. At times though some things are bound to fall through the cracks and things will be overlooked, which is understandable – nobody is perfect but at the very least a promise should be kept or never made. There’s also times when companies intentionally cut corners to save money or reach a deadline, or follow up failed items with excuses and the pointing of fingers. While it can’t be proven that all of above games fall into the latter, the facets that disappoint lend themselves to the idea that perhaps they do and I’m left wondering if we’ve come to have such low expectations in terms of quality that we feel compelled, at times, to reward the average on the premise that it was at least not below average?

Every one of these games has done well, received a fair amount of praise and seen commercial success but none of that indicates the developers ‘succeeded’ in more than turning a profit. In the industry of games turning a profit is the main objective and in that sense, yes, they accomplished the mission and these games did in fact, meet or exceed their potential. On the culture and activities end however whether or not a developer turns a profit isn’t our concern. We’re concerned with being entertained and getting the absolute most out of a game for the money and time we spend. Going back and looking at each of the games in this list, there are stark examples of things horribly wrong that should make people rather upset; how dare they waste our time with anything less than the best they can offer. We didn’t pay for a game that requires multiple patches, buggy tools, shit controls and diluted stories.

AUTHORS NOTE: I realize some would take this piece as an indication that I don’t like these games. The fact is that many of them are great games that could have been so much better if the dev teams had taken just one or two extra steps and sat down as a team and really thought about some very common superficial problems that would have been cheaper to fix before they went to press the media discs. I loved Final Fantasy, Red Dead Redemption was entertaining, and while I’m a staunch MW2 ‘hater’ I see the reasons behind why it’s popular and appealing. Just because aspects of a game are disappointing and I feel they could be better doesn’t mean I dislike it as a whole or that the games in my opinion are crap, and even if I did think the games were crap it doesn’t change the fact that the listed games have flaws that shouldn’t be there. Things can be better than what they are and there’s nothing wrong with pointing out things that need to change, that is of course unless you’re someone who thrives on mediocrity in which case you should enter politics.

Just last week I was sitting on my porch drinking my evening Earl Grey, and as the hot southern Georgia sun began to gently lick the barren plains en passe to its nightly resting place beneath the horizon, thought to myself:

“What this industry needs to more fluffed up franchised generic shooters, gimmicky peripherals, and contrived ‘services’ selling things we already own or never use. I really don’t think this industry could bear anymore original IP and culture-centric direction; it’s overrated.”

Imagine how content I was to find out that’s exactly what has been shaping up in some of the bigger E3 conferences. Also, that was sarcasm and a lot of it.

E3 is an annual event that normally makes the hearts of gamers sing and this year is probably going to be no different. Twitter, facebook, even myfonts.com has some kind of E3 updating mechanism, so it goes without saying how big a deal the expo is and how excited people become over the announcements. But, this guy – this guy for some reason hasn’t been overly shocked or pleased with the direction he suspects things are headed.

Now, this isn’t about the software per se, but the hardware since that seemed to be the big theme this year. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo walked in and did their little dance. Some of it was entertaining and some of it was lackluster. So, this piece is dedicated primarily to the hardware presentation and the message that the presentations sent out.

For several years now gamers have been awaiting the time that Microsoft would finally be releasing a ‘slim’ version of their console. Many were dissatisfied with the fact that they hadn’t followed suit with Sony in the last generation and now, finally they have. Piano black, smaller and less abstract form factor, bigger internal fan for quieter operation, built in wi-fi and shaped more like an abridged dictionary being slightly squeezed at its angular middle. The new XB360 will be the only model produced from release date forward (existing stock of older Xb360 consoles will be sold until stock is exhausted, according Microsoft).

I’m not sure whether I find Microsoft’s console strategy very appealing in terms of forking over money in this unstable economy. Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 and Kinect feel like they’re playing catch-up with everyone at once. Finally joining the ranks of their two top competitors they’ve included wi-fi, after years of temperature control issues they’ve adjusted the heat dissipation with a chip redesign and fan rearrangement, and then they’ve finally rethought the second generation of visual ugliness under control to be something that doesn’t look like it came from a NASA trashbin. In the break down of the new XBox there were things that Microsoft or anyone has yet to bring up and talk about like adjusting their hardware quality control or if there’s anything indicating addressing the fears of a new run of RoD error, the problems with disc scratches and revamping anything in the LIVE side of things to help balance out the negativity that adorns the user base.

To go with the console redesign was the re-unveiling of Project Natal as “Kinect”. 15 games at launch, a few announced by EA to work with it and a few that will be retroactively compatible. Microsoft presented stuff Nintendo did and wore out mixed with some Caucasian nerds dancing around in such a way that it lends credit to the stereotype given by non-Caucasian comics (or they looked like unashamed DDR addicts, take your pick). Well, at least we know how Microsoft feels about sloppy seconds and if you’ve ever watched Steve Balmer try to fire up a crowd, you already know how they feel about bad dancing (he loves it, especially to bad music).

The internal alterations of the new XBox 360 are superficial changes in retrospect and the Kinect isn’t all that innovative by itself, in my opinion – the biggest and most important change noticed is what these hardware changes and peripherals may indicate in terms of core business philosophy.

Call it success if you want, but it seems a lot like fear manifesting with a price tag, and that’s not helpful – it’s keeping up with the Jones’. I’m not implying that Microsoft or the XBox is by any means in danger of falling off, that they ‘suck’, or that what they’ve done here is stupid, but it really seems as though they were scared of losing more of the market share to either Sony, Nintendo, and now possibly Apple, and that in order to reinvigorate their user base they’ve more or less claimed “XBox 360: so can we”.

While all of these things are productive and helpful to the overall fanbase, or at the very least helpful in terms of a better product I have to wonder if these changes too late and to whom are they really marketed? Most existing 360 owners won’t see much in the way of added befit to acquiring the new model of 360. Chances are they’ve already got a wi-fi adapter or have simply learned to deal with wires. There aren’t any new peripherals included in the non-bundles and Microsoft has stated that Kinect will be compatible with all existing XB 360 models. Maybe Microsoft was feeling as though the software was the only thing really carrying the device to this point and got lonely in the dark, and if that’s what it took to finally make the changes in the hardware then there are bigger problems that I thought – these changes are things that for the most part, were attainable standards in 2005 when the XBox 360 was initially released. It’s not new offerings, but a latent fix after years of excuses and immovable opinion.

XBox 360 fanpersons rejoice! Your days of being the only online subscription service on a console rape victim in town will be over in a matter of days. What’s more is that you guys now apparently get a lot more for your buck even if you’re paying for it twice – because not to be outdone with relatively disappointing news, Sony held their press conference and confirmed the paid subscription boogeyman does in fact exist in their world too; “PlayStation Plus” it’s being called. Generic in term, the explanation of it all by Jack Tretton is underwhelming in nature, and the reality of it is really, really contrived.

Sure, it seemed really humorous that XBox LIVE subscribers paid Microsoft to ‘provide’ services on the XBox fans and zealots could get free elsewhere such as Facebook, Last FM, and Netflix – and it still is. However, even though most of the down-loadable content and so on require online connectivity to utilize, and without Xbox LIVE there is no ‘connectivity’, access to the data remains in the hands of the consumer. PlayStation Plus will give subscribers:

• A grab bag of full games rotating each month via PSN, they pull together a list and you pick from that.
• A video magazine subscription to “Qore”. It’s been highly criticized for lack of substantive content and too many ads for the amount of content.
• Early access to betas and demos (something that a Qore subscription already game players)
• Premium themes and avatars for free, most of which are poorly designed and obstructive or intrusive.
• Pushing firmware behind the scenes to keep the game going instead of the current method which is to alert the user every few minutes until the upgrade or force the upgrade to play the game
• And a few other uninteresting things

So, the PlayStation Plus set up, as explained, serves to ultimately replace Qore in terms of forcing fringe benefits and fix a few flaws in the current design for a price and only for as long as you pay that price (that’s right – you get Wipeout HD as part of your subscription, it is unusable if you ever cancel), and still no cross game chat – one of the few things that PS3 fans have been just shy of offering fellatio in order to get, and it’s still not there.

What Sony has done is take the existing service that was free and subdivide it into two systems, including some of the things people didn’t care about and trick them into caring about them without making them any more appealing or worthwhile rather than incorporate a separate and better service. It sits opposite Microsoft’s ‘all or nothing’ philosophy but that doesn’t make it a better idea in the long run, only a different bad idea.

Sony, dropped the soap and wants me to pick it up? Not happenin’

Nintendo so far seems to be generating the most buzz across both the blogosphere and big gamer-centric magazine houses largely due to their confirmation of the 3DS. Here’s how it went down:

A man walks on stage and says, “20 years ago audience members sat at a table, a plain brown table and ate beige plain oatmeal from a plain brown bowl. In the very near future, Nintendo will revolutionize that beige plain oatmeal and that plain brown bowl. How? Well, with a taupe plain oatmeat to eat from a burnt sienna container shaped like a the hat of a plumber.”

And the crowd promptly soiled their pants, because finally, their beige plain oatmeal had changed to something different – taupe plain oatmeal.

That’s not really how it went down, but it may as well have. Nintendo popped out of a birthday cake like Erika Eleniak in Under Siege; disoriented and annoying through a majority of the film, but topless and nearly naked long enough to make the lack of substance perfectly okay. For the most part Nintendo has always got assets to distract us from the relatively spotty performance and manages to attract an audience and retain loyalty with the few things they do really, really well. For every Virtual Boy and PowerGlove they produce a SNES and DS to make up for it – and we love them for it.

Nintendo presented the fan favorites in a line up that was relatively expected, to say the least: Link, Kirby, Mario, DK, and the rest of the gang. It’s sad though, that stating ‘the rest of the gang’ is definitive of the software assets a company provides. They’re synonymous with Nintendo and without their first party titles, they’d probably be sitting next to Sega, making titles with sporadic success. Nintendo has succeeded in that sense – they’ve been able to hold on their hardware market share because of their software. It’s not broken, but it’s boring. We know what Zelda is about and what Link can generally do. We rarely have to relearn the game play mechanics to play the games produced, so it’s old. But, with old comes nostalgia and that’s not been lost on Nintendo; it’s actually one of their finer qualities at times.

Nintendo kicked off the mundane first party reconfirmations with something more exciting: The Nindendo 3DS

Nintendo’s problem though is that they have more versions and editions of their hand-held systems than Microsoft has versions of Windows (no, really) and what better way to kick off the launch of such a device than to push players into a world they’ve already visited. I’m reminded of John Stewart’s character in Half Baked as he popped up to conspicuously ask “.. .but have you watched it on weed?” Have we played Kid Icarus? Most of us over 25 have probably played it, but have we played it in 3D? Nope, and aside from the token upgrades and minor arbitrary game mechanic enhancements that accompany all reboots it shouldn’t be a different experience in the end.

Maybe I wouldn’t be a little irritated by it if I knew in my heart that in order to play those nostalgic game with old graphics and pretty much the same experience, I need to pay the same now as I did back then to do so.

The Ninendo 3DS handheld touts the ability to natively display upcoming titles in 3D at varying degrees. I can’t say I’m overly ‘moved’ by the confirmation, as 3D movies, TVs, and the few games I’ve played never truly altered the experience or immersed me into the important part of the gaming experience any more than I was before the resurgence of 3D; call it… the ability to use my imagination. But, for some it’s an amazing prospect full of potential, and for those people I’m happy – enjoy your oatmeal.

It’s like the concept of James Cameron’s Avatar, in your hand… yes, the movie was good – uninspired, but good and the 3D was actually neat (but didn’t make the movie any better). Still, all that money and flashy concept work, hype, advertising and fanfare only for Hurt Locker to walk away the winner, imagine that. Maybe there’s something to the whole ‘function over form’ philosophy, but what what do I know?

The hand-held gaming world suffers with the users being relatively conservative and utilitarian. Hand-helds aren’t exactly the most practical way to game and there’s no established standard of performance or capabilities, only a set of things that some do and others do not. It doesn’t matter if the few things a device does are poorly executed it only matters that the device does them (look to the PSP on this one). How many things do people want in their pocket at any given time? 2,3,5…. 12? No. One, and Apple is acutely aware of this fact. If their phone can do everything a DS or PSP can do, or do enough of the same things with the same or similar games to where the consumer is stuck choosing between them, they’re going to stick with the most functional of devices; their phone (and Apple is acutely aware of this fact also). 3D suddenly seems pretty dumb on a hand-held device that now requires yet another generation of redundant software to mobilize itself until 6 months down the road Nintendo will announce the 3DSiXL^2.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that while E3 has been happening, 4th generation iPhones and Androids have been selling at record setting numbers, and there’s a pretty good reason why.

So what does all of this amount to? An empty box.

There are things that were presented by the big three that have merit and worth some degree of excitement. There’s sign of progression but it’s been bogged down by convoluted schemes and contrived system that only take away from what should be making us happy and the real joy within the culture; The original ideas and patent flare for groundbreaking advancements presented at this expo have left and it’s a sure sign that the industry is fresh out of ideas; Nintendo has little in the way of new IP but a slew of titles that are safe sequels to their top titles, most of which are so dilute that the original spirit of them died long ago or resurrected games that aren’t just archaic, they’re pre-historic; Sony and Microsoft have their own executions of a concept that held Nintendo back and done little more than to propagate shovelware around every corner; Microsoft still hasn’t figured out that dropping the long term cost of ownership is the fastest way to get popular overseas, that proprietary peripherals always fade to obscurity over time and somehow managed to convince Sony that the US market is more than willing to bend over the couch and get prison fist fucked for the sake of a label.

Where do they go from here? What are they going to do? They’d like us to believe they’ve clear plans but with thinly drawn directional lines that envelops technologies and mechanical methods of play yet to prove themselves, it’s really hard to gauge where it’ll all end up. Really, the only certain thing is that for the next couple of years gamers will be in a pit of experimental concepts feeling forced to adapt to horrible games leading to the path of being forced to adopt more poorly executed gimmicks otherwise lose out on gaming altogether. And the saddest part about it is that many gamers would believe just that.

I sure do hope that the software side of things can break away from the total lack of ideas, lack of direction, and lack of originality that their counterparts have demonstrated. I remain vigilantly hopeful but at the same time wearily doubtful. Perhaps next week I’ll be proven completely and totally wrong and my expressed fears and opinions will be seen as ‘without merit’ and textbook paranoia surfacing after years of suppressed nerd rage. Maybe I’m that old man shouting at those damn kids to get off my lawn in constant search of the glasses around my neck and a bottomless cup of prune juice… but until then, I’ll be watching trailer after trailer of generic shooter announcements on Game Trailers with “E3 2010″ in the title…

<!-- // '); })(); //]]> // --> The above logo and name may not mean much to people at the moment, but the one of the left is one that any gamer who’s ever touched a PC should know well. ModDB has long been a popular site that features user created modifications to games. It’s held as a site with strong community support and interactivity. The purpose of Mod DB is to list the mods, files, tutorials and information of any games that are capable of being modded with user-made content, and any game mod with a website is allowed to post a screenshot gallery, news, and requests for help. It’s also a place to interact with people using various development kits like Scimitar (Assassin’s Creed), CryENGINE (Crysis), OGRE (Torchlight), and the XNA based Valkyrie Engine to name a few (there are currently around 150 engines and engine variants listed). In many ways, ModDB has become an integral part of the game mod development community in that it serves to showcase and give access to the golden underbelly to things possible when independent creative minds come together towards making a game better or different. ModDB site creator, Scott “INtense!” Reismanis is launching another site soon- “Desura“, which is currently in closed beta.

On the surface it looks, feels and sounds an awful lot like Steam and in some ways it is very much like Steam, D2D, GamersGate, etc. Steam currently holds an estimated 70% of the digital distribution market share, and with the other digital distribution outlets in place to nibble at the remaining 30% it would seem that there’s little room for a new face. In actuality, not only is Desura backed by the already strong audience and content of ModDB, but it’s setting itself apart from the bunch by being ‘developer driven and community run with user made content:

DEVELOPER DRIVEN – For those familiar with the inner-workings of ModDB, Desura takes the concept of ModDB a step further by providing a robust digital media network of ‘release’ products and then places it on a unified distribution platform. And, like ModDB it continues to provide user made content to a wide audience while keeping the connection between developer and community tight-knit, yet openly welcoming. A better idea on what exactly Desura intends to give developers using the platform include control of sales, ways to extract beta testers and receive direct feedback, methods to distribute custom engines, and tool distribution to name a few.

Most importantly, Desura is designed to allow independent developers to create content for existing games. Still, Desura has heavy competition with Steam so why wouldn’t someone opt to go with the already established Steam? Since Valve owns and runs Steam and makes extremely successful games like Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead, there’s a potential conflict of interest whenever Steam rejects a game.

In an interview with “The Reticule” Reismanis states:

So many mods are amazing accomplishments, combining creativity with steadfast dedication and yet so many are missed by gamers, because they don’t know how to get them or that they even exist. Desura will provide a platform for mods to reach large audiences they never could in the past and at the same time will provide tools and APIs that only commercial games have access to. I believe we can also do the same for indie games, because whilst there are many now getting recognition on Steam, XBOXLive, PSN and other places, there are still many more getting missed. Developers who care about their players will flourish on Desura, because we give them the ability to build a fanbase and generate interest in their game by sharing frequent updates with the entire Desura community. This also applies to commerical games, who will benefit from mod support and the potential new customers that can now bring them.

COMMUNITY RUN – The Desura Community is in great touch with one another; a mix between standard forum boards with groups to teams with a focus on developing specific things for games or types of games. While Desura isn’t where one could find the development staff of Half-Life 2 or Left 4 Dead, the Valve group is a portal to all things Valve: The Source and GoldSource engine, mods for Team Fortress, tutorials on NPC relationships and creating moving stairs like in Portal, and of course general discussion on the many facets of the game, engine, and mods. All done between users and developers alike. From a community standpoint, having the ability to be in contact directly with developers means having, to a degree, the ability to help shape the outcome of a product.

Aside from that, community members are able to do standard activities such as post screen shots, write blog posts and reviews, and interact with one another. The community pages are fairly dynamic and keep pertinent information at close hand without the need to constantly change pages.

USER MADE CONTENT – Where the deal gets sort of sweet is exclusivity, or rather a lack of. The problem with other digital distribution outlets is they encourage patronage with exclusive deals or by being the only place to offer a certain title. A customer may only be able to get OutCry on Gamers Gate and the older, but still popular Master of Orion from GoG… over time what Desura could end up providing could be based on the open platform as a place to be rid of the exclusivity. Riesmanis is on record as stating:

While at the moment we don’t have any “paid for” content, that is the next step. At the moment it is a “proof of concept” demonstrating some of the functionality will aim to eventually provide. So yes Desura will provide paid content, and it will also provide free indie games and mods. No other digital distribution portals offer this, so we are fairly certain gamers will love Desura thanks to some astonishing user-made content out there, which is sadly missed by most games.

I was granted the opportunity to toss a few questions of my own to Scott Reismanis about Desura and in his own words describes some of the philosophies and base attributes behind Desura:

Shawn Gordon (SG): You’ve stated that this is a completely open project and likened it to Wikipedia, but open doesn’t mean free. A question you’ll probably get a few hundred more times in the coming months by journalists and developers alike, is there a subscription fee or cost structure that will be implemented for developers to help maintain the site?

Scott Reismanis (SR):Open in the sense that we give developers and the community the ability to add and control the content on Desura. We simply check it and ensure it is high-quality to warrant being shown. Community driven and developer run is the line we use. Also the service will be entirely free, so getting free mods for your favourite games will not cost you anything. We aim to make money by selling commercial and indie games.

(SG):Going back to ‘open’, are you of the mindset that ‘open source’ is a philosophy or a pragmatic methodology and why (with either)?

(SR):The Desura website and application are not open source, we use the word open because we are not trying to create a “walled garden” like many of the other digital distribution services out there. Our firehose of data will be available for 3^rd parties to integrate, we encourage the community and developers to use all of the services we provide be it on their website or ours. We are excited to see what apps, widgets, sites etc that developers will create as a result. Note that this functionality is not available now, but will come with time as we refine and finalize our system.

(SG):Desura is “developer driven / community run”. That in mind, Desura features a list of top tier publishers and developers such as EA, Ubisoft, and 2K – the little guys, the indie developers, they have a place of equal perch, right?

(SR):We don’t have relationships established with any developers big or small at the moment. The only reason why you see those names is because we support mods for some of the games we have made. Indie games are treated exactly the same as their commercial counterparts. In fact because our platform is open and “developer run” – this will be great for indies because it is up to them to add content and information about their game and sell it to the community. Given how passionate indie developers are (they do it for the love), this should come easy to them.

(SG):ModDB is a great site, full of great content. One of the things that has made it such a profound place is the community. It becomes obvious that ModDB was built around ‘community’. Desura has the same feel with greater organization. Aside from that I noticed that profile information, blog posts, posted media, etc., carries over from ModDB to Desura. What is going to happen to ModDB when Desura finally goes gold – Will the two sites run in tandem or is Desura an evolutionary replacement for ModDB?

(SR):The two sites serve totally different purposes and should co-exist well. We view Desura as a distribution platform for quality released games and mods. So for gamers that only want finished content, Desura makes it easy to find and play. On the other hand, ModDB will continue to list upcoming games and mods, so it caters more towards developers and gamers who like to track games from start to finish. Once a game or mod is released, the developer simply clicks the “publish on Desura” button and all information on ModDB is ported over, making it super easy for the developer while retaining the fanbase they have worked hard to build during their games development.

(SG):Outside of much stronger community overtones, Desura feels almost like a direct competitor to Steam yet the site contains a button that reads “Join us on Steam”. Is Desura best a “mirror”, a competitor, an enhanced ’skin’, or ‘the other side of the coin’ to Steam and what specifically would make a developer more inclined to function through Desura over another network platform such as iTunes or Steam or game specific communities like ijji, NCSoft, and Nexon?

(SR):Steams a great service, so we will encourage developers to try and release their games on as many platforms as possible. It isn’t like they have to choose one or the other. We hope to be able to compete with steam by offering a stronger community experience, augmented with mods for your favourite games and also putting more control in the hands of developers. Combine these elements and with time I believe you will find Desura is quite unique and different from Steam and other competitors out there. The comparisons will come and that’s fine – once we get the developers on board Desura should really begin to shine. We are just trying to manage expectations at the moment, because this won’t happen overnight.

(SG):In traversing the available features of Desura in beta, one of the more interesting sections I took note of was giving developers a method to give people beta access to games, DLC and mods. Essentially, in the section overall is a sub-storefront control panel (with the understanding that the developers can offer things at no charge as well), for anyone who develops games, mods and add-ons. This is vastly more open than a lot of other places. What spurred the idea to create such a place?

(SR):Behind the scenes developers can branch their releases on Desura – so they can potentially upload a number of different version of their game or mod. How each of these releases is distributed is up to the developer, they can invite gamers to free betas, run experimental versions, it is entirely up to them. Mods were built in because too much amazing user-made content is currently missed by many gamers, who don’t know what it is and find it too difficult to install any play. Essentially anything that is great for developers and great for gamers we want to build into Desura, and these are two ideas we thought would yield pretty cool results.

(SG):I enjoyed the game Half-Life 2, and often play mods, but I also have it installed and ’shortcutted’ via Steam. From Desura I can install a shortcut to Half-Life 2 to the Desura app but when I go to play, it starts Steam. I understand that whether or not someone purchased the title on disc or via Steam, that Steam is required to play it. However what I’m unsure of is the point of installing the shortcut on Desura if it’s going to open Steam anyway. What is the advantage of using one over the other?

(SR):Due to the way Steam works, to play games you have bought with Steam you need to have it running. Unless Steam gives us a means to directly launch games that will continue to happen. We expect people to use Desura because they prefer it, or they use it for the mods and content and community we have which no one else does. You should also be able to buy your games on Desura, which we hope many will decide to do.

(SG):It took me under 10 minutes to download a 1.3 GB mod for Half-Life 2 (seriously, I timed it), which for most people in the US, is crazy fast. I understand that during the closed beta phase of Desura (or closed beta anything) the site traffic is low because there’s a limited number of people with access, and that the number of people on a network pulling data from a server simultaneously has an effect on network download speeds (among other things). Do the developers host their materials and wares on their own servers, and if so do you plan on encouraging developers to keep their speeds up to help ensure users don’t get frustrated on download wait times and lines?

(SR):We host all of the files on our servers. As demand increases we will boost capacity. We want you to get your games as fast as possible, so expect fast speeds to continue as long as we can keep up!

Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t restate the emphasis on ‘beta’ with Desura. The service was announced late December of last year on the ModDB forums and has since blown up. Reismanis says Desura staff have “received hundreds of emails from game developers wanting to use Desura, and gamers wanting beta access.”

Desura was one of the 5 finalists in the “Who’s Got Game” during the March 10,2010 GamesBeat@GDC event.

This article appears in it's original format on Fairchild6.com

Star Fox, one of the most loved franchises on any Nintendo console with some of the most loyal fans, may not need to wait much longer for another installment of this heralded title. This time around however, neither Nintendo nor any of the other previous development teams have anything to do with it – and that’s one of the aspects of Star Fox: Shadows of Lylat (SoL) we find most interesting and exciting.

Fan made titles are always fun to see and especially exciting when realized. SoL is no different. With over 5 years of teamwork and dedication Team SOL is uncertain whether or not the final product will see light of day, they’ve not let that slow them down or stop them from putting forth every effort to the contrary. Yet, the questions remain; even if people put all this work an energy, and no one pulls the plug on the project will it be something people go for and will the game be worth playing? By what we’ve seen and been told, the game should hold a special place for both Star Fox fans and fans of Space Sim shooters. While breaking away from the arcade style of shooter the original Star Fox franchise had been, the simulation angle would tend to give it a more detailed and mature look and feel. Still much of the appreciation of the game once realized will be held in both the control mechanics and the story telling.

Editor Dolovey Herman was granted the opportunity to talk with Benjamin Suhr, Project Manager for Shadows of Lylat. Suhr gives insight on their current, highly anticipated project:

Dolovey Herman (DH): I believe what a lot of fans are wondering is, how did you obtain the licensing to do this?

Benjamin Suhr (BS): We do not have a license. Shadows of Lylat is by no means an official title. Neither Nintendo, nor Namco or any other company had anything to do with the game. We are completely at their mercy. They can stop the project at any time. We hope they consider “SoL” to be fan art, as we do.

DH: While being an indie developer, how does Star Fox Shadows of Lylat compare to your other creations? Or is this your first?

BS: Many of the developers in the team already had some modding experience before they joined. Even now most of them are working on multiple projects. I think “Diaspora”, a Battlestar Galactica game, and before “Beyond the Red” should be mentioned. We shared and still share quite a few members with them.

As for myself, I worked on a few mod projects before as well, helped updating effects and textures for Freespace 2, but “SoL” is the first project I’ve been in a lead position in.

Exclusive screen shot of SoL (Credit: Benjamin Suhr)

DH: From what you’ve done so far, how do you think fans will react to the changes you’ve made, such as: from game console to computer and back to all Airwing assault?”

BS: We hope fans will understand that we tried to turn Freespace 2 into a Star Fox game, as much as possible. Some things are still simply impossible to do. In some cases we deliberately did things different though. For example the ship selection after the mission briefing. It would have been easy to just allow the player to pick one ship, but we decided to allow the player to choose from all ships he/she may use at that point of the story.

I think many players will like this, but I know some players won’t be happy with anything that isn’t exactly like in the original games. We are trying to get “SoL” to feel like a Star Fox game, but we are not trying to copy everything. Like between the original games, there will be some differences.

DH: Although fans of the Star Fox series (including myself) weren’t too impressed with ground assault in the most recent additions to the Star Fox franchise I must ask: will there be any ground assault? Such as the Landmaster, or Third to First Person-shooter?

BS: While it might not be completely impossible anymore, I can’t promise there will be a Landmaster level. I can tell you there will be no on-foot missions. The engine isn’t suited for this. As long we can’t do it somewhat properly, we won’t try it.

The Freespace 2 Open engine is currently being reworked and the Source Code Project (SCP) developers are looking for additional coders, so things might change. Those changes usually take a long time though. On the other hand we might not even feature on-foot missions, even if we had the possibility to.

DH: Judging by trailers one and two, Shadows of Lylat looks extremely detailed overall! If I may ask, will the controls and handling be fairly intricate? If so, what actions are required?

BS: The controls will be reworked. Right now they are exactly the same as in Freespace 2, except for corridor missions.

Freespace 2 requires you to use a lot of keys to control your ship/hud/targeting. We’ve already reduced that, but the ultimate goal is to make “SoL” playable as well on a gamepad, as it currently is on keyboard and mouse.

It’s a lot of work and I don’t know if we can manage to do it before the first release.

DH: Will there be dialogue?

BS: Yes, all dialogue will be voiced in English. We already found some pretty good voice actors. There will be another casting though.

The voice acting will be one of the final steps before release 1.

Exclusive screen shot of SoL (Credit: Benjamin Suhr)

DH: Besides what we’ve seen, what are some new weapons that we should expect in the next thrilling Star Fox chapter?

BS: We had a few new weapons in the game, but decided to take them out again. For one part it made the weapon upgrading via power-ups too complicated, but it also made the multiplayer balancing more complex. It simply didn’t work well with our “pick up and play” rule.

There will be a new Arwing model though, at least in multiplayer. It has not yet been decided what kind of weapons it will carry. Maybe you’ll see some new weapons there.

DH: How long until we are able to play a demo or hopefully the whole Star Fox game?

We canceled the demo when we realized how much content we put in it. So we decided to put some more effort in it and turn it into a full first release of the game.

• The single player part will be short, but every stage will be very different. You’ll see a lot of impressive stuff in the first few stages.
• The multi-player mode will feature almost all ships of the final version.
• All those ships can be used to create custom missions. We’ll release “SoL” with the latest version of the Freespace 2 mission editor.
• Players will have enough content in the game to create something completely new.

We hope to see many many fan-made missions while we’re working on the final release. Some good ideas might influence the final game.

DH: Are there any certain programs that we must have installed to run this game? If so what are they?

BS: As Shadows of Lylat is completely stand-alone, there is no program you have to install other than the game itself. The only requirement is OpenAL, which many players probably already have installed for other games.

DH: Being an indie developer can be rewarding, but it can also be quite the challenge. With that in mind, what are your hopes in terms of outcome with Shadows of Lylat?

BS: After all the work we spent on the game, we can only hope it will be popular and played by many players. There some space game fans out there that don’t know anything about Star Fox yet, because they only play PC games. We’d like to make them aware of Star Fox.

DH: Has there been any word from Nintendo or the previous developers of the SF series on their feelings towards your endeavor?

BS: So far only Dylan Cuthbert, president of the game development company Q-Games and one of the developers of the original Star Fox for the Super Nintendo, is the only one we (indirectly) heard from. Of course we hope everybody involved in the Star Fox franchise will be proud have fans dedicated enough to spend their free time on a project like this. I hope we will get some feedback from them after the release.

DH: If the plug were to be pulled on the title in terms of licensing the ‘brand’ as it were, would you redesign the ships and characters so that ‘all the work isn’t gone’?

BS: There currently are not plans what we will do if Nintendo decides to shut down our project. However if we wanted to create a completely new game, we would have done so. I guess a lot of the content we created would go directly to other projects we’re working on.

Exclusive screen shot of SoL (Credit: Benjamin Suhr)

Looking forward to more development from Team SOL? More information about Star Fox: Shadows of Lylat can be obtained on the official SoL FAQ page and the development team Game Warden page.

In March of 1775 at a small church, a radical by the name of Patrick Henry gave a speech to the Virginia Convention. In his speech Henry said one of the most famous lines in American History: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

The context of his words urges the Virginia Colony to send troops to fight in the American Revolutionary War; a war that ultimately made possible the nation which grants certain inalienable rights and liberties- The United States of America. Over time people rallied and readily championed a multitude of our Constitutional “freedom to” and "freedom of" while losing sight of the tertiary status entailed; what about “Freedom from”?

In 1987 the Dead Kennedys released an album with sharp commentary on American consumerism titled “Give Me Convenience, or Give Me Death”. It would seem that between 1775 and 1987 freedom to and freedom from are only worth fighting for only if it’s convenient. But, nothing is convenient about being convenient, a great downward spiral to which the depths push a society bent on having things spoonfed to them spend as much energy in finding ways to adapt to poor conditions and manufacture acceptability as would be spent elevating themselves back to naturally occurring good conditions. Yes, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain the best interests of people are always in mind, read our collective lips – no new taxes, I did not have sex with that woman, and free health care for all.

From the Washington Post last week:

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether California can ban the sale or rental of violent video games to children.

The court will review a federal court’s decision to throw out California’s ban. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Sacramento said the law violated minors’ rights under the First and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution.

California’s law would have prohibited the sale or rental of violent games to anyone under 18. It also would have created strict labeling requirements for video game manufacturers. Retailers who violated the act would have been fined up to $1,000 for each violation.

The law never took effect, and was challenged shortly after it was signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. A U.S. District Court blocked it after the industry sued the state, citing constitutional concerns.

Opponents of the law note that video games already are labeled with a rating system that lets parents decide what games their children can purchase and play. They also argue that the video games are protected forms of expression under the First Amendment.

The high court’s action Monday was surprising, given that justices just last week voted 8-1 to strike down a federal law that banned videos showing animal cruelty. The California case poses similar free speech concerns, although the state law is aimed at protecting children, raising an additional issue that affect the high court’s consideration.

California lawmakers approved the law, in part, by relying on several studies suggesting that some video games can be linked to aggression, anti-social behavior and desensitization to violence in children. But federal judges have dismissed that research.

The supporters of the law say the same legal justifications for banning minors from accessing pornography can be applied to violent video games. They point to recent Federal Trade Commission studies suggesting that the video game industry’s rating system was not effective in blocking minors from purchasing M-rated, or mature-rated games, designed for adults.

But courts in other states have struck down similar laws.

The First Amendment is a tragic protagonist of an amendment indeed, but it’s become somewhat of an excuse to say or do anything in modern times; a close to literal “Catch-22″. That said, no right is absolute. With the ‘falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater’ as the classic example for lack of absolution, absolution removes responsibility of the party making the false claim and aside from being subject to an array of ’slippery slope’ arguments, isn’t morally or ethically justifiable; to willfully make a false statement with a known negative outcome is wrong and should be illegal because it can cause great harm. There are two landmark cases to keep in mind here: Schenk v. United States and Bradenburg v. Ohio

Oliver Holmes, the presiding Justice in the Schenk v. United States case stated:

“The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”

Later overturned by the Bradenburg v. Ohio case, the scope of banned speech was limited to banning speech that incited imminent lawless action. This would retain the famous “Falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater” but would again allow speech that supported insubordination such as what the modern Tea Party does. Neither however support hate speech or making threats of violence (that’s illegal, as proof of the limitation of Constitutional Rights).

For the Video game industry to use the First Amendment as a protective clause as a means for allowing artistic expression in the face of censorship is acceptable, but to use it as a shield to try and block legislation designed to keep violent materials from minors lends itself to the idea that publishers do in fact, market the materials to appeal an audience below the ESRB rating. The movie industry is guilty of the same type of marketing evidenced by the urge to change “X” to “NC-17″ because “X” hurt box office sales, and recently the movie industry now urging the MPAA to retire “NC-17″ in exchange for “Heavy R” because now “NC-17″ hurts box office sales. The game industry has made similar lobbies yet comply with the voluntary action of submitting games for ESRB review not to sell more, but to keep from selling less… a sort of stop-loss variant model.

Studies alleging a link between violent behavior and violent video games isn’t fully legit (arguably) due in part to the methodology of said studies, interested parties of the studies, and the generally vague and conflicting conclusions between the various studies over the course of study. Retail stores should however, be forced to limit what they place in the hands of their patrons, especially if corporations are given ‘personhood’. Personhood, or rather “Corporate Personhood” is the other sticky matter in this mess.

The Fourteenth Amendment as it pertains to ‘corporate personhood’ gives corporations rights as a ‘legal person’; arguably intended by the Nation’s founders and framers to enjoy many, if not all, of the same rights as natural persons (tangible, fleshy people), such as the right to lobby the government, the right to due process and compensation before being deprived of property, and the right to speak freely. Just this year the Supreme Court issued a ruling affirming and expanding corporate rights to free speech in elections. Treading the slippery slope argument “At what point does it end?”, it ends when corporations find no advantage in exercising that right. This is the underlying problem: greed. As individuals in society, there is no monetary gain in expressing an opinion. Stated opinions can influence others, sure, but very often opinions yield no money (particularly unsolicited ones) or there is no tangible reward for truly express an opinion to influence another with honesty. They’re given for moral and or ethical reasons. The point of business is to make money and if a business functions in any other way for any other reason than to make money, then it is not a successful business; even non-profit businesses turn money (but must spend it all to break even or lose NP status). Most of the time ethics and morals are only exercised because laws limit their actions or because the cost of avoiding them is higher than the gains made by demonstrating them.

Still, the difference between morals and ethics is that morals are defined by the courage ethics lack. In other words, an ethical man knows he shouldn’t cheat on his wife, and a moral man won’t; morals being the practice of ethics.

Recently there was written a blog where a group of parents had made an appeal to the XBL mods to enforce clean language or at least enable a system to do so because their children had consistently been exposed to rude language, immature behavior and mature topics (read: the typical behavior of the online community) . One parent in particular had used their child’s experience online as an example and stated that their 5 year old had asked an online player to stop cussing over the headset. The offender failed to comply and was asked a second time. Of course the offender didn’t comply and when the parent took the headset and asked the offender to be mindful of children on the game and to clean up their behavior, was cussed at and challenged.

On it’s face this seems reasonable for the parent to be upset and as though they’ve every right to file complaint. Many people would support the parent in their request and perhaps on some level the parent has a valid place to complain, I for one wouldn’t want my 6 year old listening in on even a fraction of the things said over the chat systems however; I find equal fault in the parent given that the FPS in question was, as 99% of FPS titles, rated M. So my question becomes: Why was a 5 year old on an M rated game, online, and why should the majority of the intended community be asked to tone down their behavior to cater an an audience that for all intents and purposes be absent?

Responsible parents have to worry about what comes into their home and around their children. In the above, it seems as though the parent was using the game as a babysitter, and then to also understand that the child was wearing the headset indicates that the parent had no concept for what goes on – yet the fact they owned one also indicated someone in the house did, but who? Was this parent an example of an irresponsible parent? No, but it isn’t an example of a responsible moment either. Who was there to act as the conscious? Apparently no one, but should anyone other than the individual being exposed? Can it be argued that the 5 year old knew better? Shame upon the 5 year old for not regulating themselves.

In some ways the argument can be re-focused to comparisons of the “explicit lyrics” label on music and the voluntary conditions by which that label is applied. Bringing music as a comparative in the debate however is fairly weak in contrast to using the movie industry because you hear music whereas you see and hear both movies and games. Games in this case have even more immersion given that they require personal interaction whereas movies and music have no interaction other than observing.

Ponder this:

If one were to consider that the rating systems of both the ESRB and MPAA are in lieu of government imposed censorship laws (and they are – they’re the societal and industry condoned ‘happy medium’). Both groups are non profit and the industry volunteers to their service for the release of their respective associated media. Both are set up as guides for parents as a supplemental feature in the decision making process. Only the MPAA rating of an “R” and “NC-17″ have accompanying laws that restrict the sale of tickets to minors without the presence of a ‘responsible’ adult (read: parent or guardian, one who is responsible for the well being of the minor). If movies are less interactive, why is there a law regulating distribution and sales of tickets to observe the media?

Not to champion governmental control and intervention, if a society cannot take responsibility on it’s own or if the industry by which intervention effects would have overall positive affect, then a degree of intervention should occur. People can make the argument (slippery slope argument) that enacting such a law would provide law makers the power to legislate control on all aspects of entertainment, in many ways akin to book burning; that the corporations effects would and should file onus and hold the government responsible for the outcome, or that such laws would severely burden the government with things they need not be a part. While in an extreme this is a valid argument there are already laws restricting sales of certain materials to minors such a pornography, alcohol, weapons, tobacco, lotto tickets (all of which have been proven to create problems for both individuals and society, yet are legally obtained and used responsibly by many). There is no need for an entertainment focused ATF / DEA, nor is this the call.

There are already laws restricting the sales of tickets to an “R” rated movie to individuals under the age of 17 with a stipulation that many would overlook in this debate: “unless accompanied by an adult over the age of 18″. It really only restricts minors from being self exposed to things society deems harmful, but doesn’t wedge itself between what a parent or guardian deems acceptable. The government doesn’t get any more involved than making a simple rule. It acknowledges the subjectivity of the MPAA rating, and allots for parents and legal guardians to override the suggestion by physically being present to purchase the ticket. What happens after the ticket sale then becomes the responsibility of the individual and not the ticket retailer, movie industry, or government.

Laws governing the ticket sales haven’t budged much if at all and no one is pushing for the law to go one way or another; whether or not it keeps them from sneaking in is another matter entirely, and falls from the scope of the specific law.

Now, ponder this:

Since when was it sound to allow the interest of business and industries to supersede those interests of the citizens that make up both the government which legislates and corporations which sell? And if corporations can be trusted, specifically retail corporations, with the interests of society and or an individual what is the reason for laws enforcing a degree of ethics, for example the “Lemon Laws”, and then why does it extend past cars to other items like boats, RVs, and even computers? The answer is that corporations can’t be trusted to act upon ethics without checks and watchdog groups in the face of profits which is why those laws are made and enforced in the first place.

There’s a fairly ‘easy’ set of possible solutions to all of this:

1.) Merge MPAA with ESRB and extend the ticket sales restriction of “NC-17″ and “R” rated films to either retag “M” and “AO” game titles within the merger, or put them on legal equivalence within the the ticket sales laws.

2.) Enact a law to restrict sales of “M” and “AO” titles under the same pretexts of the law for “R” and “NC-17″.

3.) Repeal the law restricting ticket sales to movies rated “R” and “NC-17″ and put things on an even keel across the board.

The above article likens the proposed laws with similar restrictions to sales of pornography, but this is also a weak logic area. “M” rated games are closer to “R” rated movies and “AO” rated games are closer to “NC-17″ movies. In fact, there are only 24 “AO” rated games listed in Wikipedia, most of which are for violence rather than sex, and 0 listed in production. What this says is that developers are not setting out to create games accessible to a limited audience. If anything, enacting such a law would encourage developers to create games with broader appeal and push innovation.

No matter how the problem is solved or if it continues to persist we have greater responsibility and interest in stopping potential harm to ourselves because while corporations have equal right with personhood to stop potential profit loss and protect their interests, they’re made up from individuals within our society. Those corporations will come and go but the people that they’re made up of will remain, and in a society that champions equality, ‘ain’t no one more special than another‘.

Finally, perhaps the most perplexing aspect of this whole deal in debate is that it is taken far out of context. This bill would grant corporations the power to step back and be removed from responsibility when a minor obtains a copy of this kind of material since the law would stipulate they are not legally allowed to do so. The responsibility then gets placed on the individual who bought it or the parents who allow their child to be exposed. Is that not the underlying cry here, to keep the responsibility on the individual?

Turba. It means “Crowd” in Latin. Whether or not this linkage was intentional, Turba should be a game that pleases crowds with its unique take on freedom equally within the dynamics and mechanics of this puzzle game laced with a user’s music library.

But, you may be wondering “What exactly is Turba?”

In the words of the developers from their site:

Turba is a puzzle game that is influenced by the music the player chooses. The game consists of 4 colors that can be made into combos of 3 or more. Combos can be made anywhere on the board at anytime, but the player is limited to one combo of each color at a time.

Obviously, music has a large role in this colorful puzzler. The most attractive concept of the game, in my opinion, is that it allows the user to use the music they already have. There’s nothing wrong with a handy stock list of music and there are many talented individuals who can generate music for a game (as demonstrated in a previous interview of Jason Wishnov) – sometimes developers just need to let players rely on their own tastes and Turba does this. As most people know, music sets a mood, tone and pace. If players want to get their ‘relax’ on with St. Germain, they can. If players wanted to step it up and get hard and crunchy with Crowbar, they can do that too. Allowing users to use their own stored music files also helps keep the game highly approachable. Not everyone will be into dance beats or heavy metal, so if gran-dad want’s to blow the dust off the Victrola with some Nat King Cole or some Ella Fitzgerald – well then they too, can rock out with their roosters out just as easily as their grand-kids who are stuck on that “Wheels on the bus” sing-a-long. People identify with things based on the music, and become pushed from or pulled to an experience around the musical setting, as an example, play a game with the volume down and there are many facets of the game experience that are missed or greatly eroded. But, within Turba the music also has an affect on the game mechanically.

Currently supported file formats are MP3 (.mp3), FLAC (.flac), Ogg Vorbis (.ogg), Monkey’s Audio (.ape), and Musepack (.mpc).

Playing the game is simple enough. It’s a puzzler in which a player needs to match three or more of a color. The board doesn’t automatically clear when matches are made; rather the player chooses when blocks are cleared. This allows greater control and opens the game to more diverse strategies. Unlike other puzzlers, the game uses the music to determine which block colors appear next for the player.

There are also Special Power items that offer players the ability to build better combos and subsequently higher scores. The Special Power items are as follows:

• Wild Card: Ten random blocks will become “wild cards”, these wildcards can be turned into any of the 4 normal blocks.(Red, Green, Blue, Yellow)
• Roulette:Once activated the Roulette wheel will start to spin. When the wheel stops the color that is selected will be taken off the current board.
• Row Swap (Unique to Freeplay):Upon activation, the player has 10 seconds to swap as many rows as they choose. After the 10 seconds is up, the player will be granted 2 row swaps that can be used at any time.
• Block Bank (Unique to Ascend:When activated, the blocks that would normally spawn on the board are taken and put into a bank. This occurs for 5 seconds. At any point the player may take the topmost block from the bank and place it anywhere on the board. The block can replace another block, or it can be dropped on top of the board.

To go with this, there are three modes of play:

Free Play: In Freeplay Mode, the bottom row of blocks will clear after 5 and 2 beats on Moderate and Intense, respectively. If Casual difficulty is selected, the bottom row will only be cleared if the player chooses, either by pressing Q or scrolling the mouse wheel down. The blocks in this mode are randomly generated and thus are different each time for a specific song.

Ascend: In Ascend mode, blocks will spawn into the board with each beat, 1, 2, or 3 at a time depending on difficulty. If the blocks fill the entire screen, the game will be failed. Two columns can be switched at any point during this game via the Tab key. The blocks in this mode are based off the song, so each specific song will play out the same way each time.

Descend: In Descend mode, blocks will slowly creep from the top of the screen, one row at a time. The rows of blocks move according to the beat. In this mode the player has the ability to move blocks up or down. Once a block is moved it will continue until any of the follow occur:

• The block collides with another block.
• The block falls off the screen.
• Or the block touches another block of the same color.

PAX East just finished up, and attendees Binary Take over, developers of Turba were present. Unfortunately I did not attend PAX for its inaugural launch, but I was fortunate enough to speak with Keith Morgado and Jonathan Delong about their game, indie pragmatism, and the arduous task of a custom beat detector in an email correspondence interview.

Shawn Gordon (SG): You’ve stated that you’re both a graduate of Full Sail University, what were your degrees in?

Morgado & Delong (M&D): The title for our degrees is a Bachelor’s of Science in Game Development. The program lasts around 21 months. The first few months they teach you the very basics of C++ programming as well as some advanced math. After that you start learning every aspect of games, from AI programming, to rendering (both Direct-X and OpenGL), to basic design principles. It is a pretty amazing and fast paced experience, and you certainly have to be prepared to work hard.

SG: Every fan of games has, at some point, an endeavor to create a game of their own. At what point did you guys realize that you could actually do this?

M&D: Well like most people, it’s safe to say we’ve wanted to make a game our whole lives. We have pretty good creative minds, so from a design standpoint, there wasn’t really much that could really hold us back. As far as actually making the game from a technical standpoint, we really couldn’t have imagined doing that until we went to Full Sail, seeing as we had little to no experience in the technical aspects it takes to make a game until we started there. Our education provided us the technical prowess we needed to call ourselves game developers. I don’t think either of us would even consider ourselves amazing programmers (we couldn’t seem to get any jobs, which is why we started our own company to begin with), but passion and determination can help carry you anywhere you want to go.

SG: For you, what does it mean to be ‘indie’?

M&D: Well unfortunately for us, right now it means to be poor . But besides that, indie is a lot of different things to different people. Indie is waking up every day and deciding what you want to work on next, and when you want to start doing it. Indie is everyone on your team having a say in every aspect of what you’re doing. Indie is likened to Burger King, two places where you are free to have it your way.

SG: If you could change anything about the mainstream development climate, what would you change?

M&D: The obvious answer here is probably: to steer the industry away from the safe habit of making the same games over and over again. How many more Rock Bands or generic FPS games do we really need? It is just unrealistic to think that this habit will be broken anytime soon, though. As long as something keeps selling, the suits have no reason to want to do anything experimental. It is far too risky of a business venture. The indie game scene is awesome because we can afford to try zany new ideas. Some of them don’t work, but some of them go on to be a ‘Braid’ or ‘World of Goo’.

SG: You guys named your studio “Binary Takeover”, but two words thrown together are meaningless. Where does “Binary Takeover” come from, does it have significant meaning?

M&D: The name Binary Takeover is an idiom for eventual takeover of technology. You really see it every day; most of us nowadays would be lost without our mobile devices attached to our hips. We were really hoping that the name would make people sit back and notice the non tech things in life. It annoys me sometimes that people expect almost instant responses to a text message. We may be a tech/video game company but we are huge advocates of going outside and enjoying the little things.

SG: On your Kickstarter project page I noticed you mention building upon the feedback from early alpha and beta release participants. In development, how has player feedback been essential to the overall production of the game?

M&D: To be honest, most feedback you try to get is about bugs or problems people may be encountering. Just playing the game yourself makes it impossible to find every issue. But we also encouraged people to give us their thoughts on the game itself. If our users aren’t having fun, we aren’t doing our jobs as game developers. Thankfully almost everyone who had emailed us way back when we had public releases really enjoyed the game. You also get suggestions for changes from people that you might have never thought of otherwise, and they can turn out being better than what you had. Feedback also helps encourage you to hammer away on a feature until it is finally good. The main example of this is our beat detection. Back in August and October of last year when we had playable builds for people, our beat detection was, suffice it to say, pretty bad. People had no problem telling us this. We knew it wasn’t that great at that point, but if people don’t constantly tell us so, maybe we don’t continue to try and make it better? I think we’re on like, the 6th iteration of code for it >_< . I’ve gone through a ton of my music library the last few days and I can honestly sit here and say I think it is pretty damn exceptional in most cases. I hope everyone else thinks so too, and realizes how hard it actually really is, considering the wealth of different types of music in existence.

SG: Turba seems like a mixture of concepts compiled skillfully into something that stands on merits unique to the title while remaining simple and approachable, what were the inspirations for Turba?

M&D: Most color matching games give you limited control over what you can do. You try to maneuver pieces next to each other, and then the game will clear them away for you. We wanted to give the player full control over the game board, letting them select which blocks they wanted, and clear them from the board when they wanted. We wanted to reward forward thinking, by letting the player clear as few or as many blocks they needed to set bigger combos. We thought using music to make each game a different experience would be an awesome thing to do, because we love music and because everyones’ experience would be totally unique, since we all enjoy different types of music.

SG: A game you guys made previously, “Lost Marbles” was a final project for college. It felt like a reminiscent mixture of the classic NES “Marble Madness” with a more recent title “Cuboid” (to me). What is Turba most like that players could associate with?

M&D: Hmm well actually we all equated ‘Lost Marbles’ to ‘The Lost Vikings’ (one of Blizzard’s first games) and ‘Marble Blast Ultra’. I believe it actually stated in our design doc that the game was meant to be a hybrid of the two . But anyway, I suppose it is easy to associate our game to any “match-3″ game, such as Bejeweled. Matching 3 or more of the same color is the very core aspect of the game. We also draw associations with ‘Audiosurf’, which will likely happen to any game that comes out now that lets the player use their own music. Even if the core gameplay is completely different but uses music to determine what happens, everyone likes to immediately equate it to ‘Audiosurf’ . That is certainly a great game they we enjoy though. It set the bar pretty high. We hope we can earn a (small) spot in peoples’ hearts alongside it.

SG: People are going to play Turba and have a list of things that they find important and unique – from the Descend Mode to the previously touched on, use of players’ stored music. As the creator though, what do you think is the most creative feature – the personal ‘baby’ – that one thing added to the game that you personally find most interesting?

M&D: At the end of the day it is what we talked about earlier, that being the fact that the player has full control over the blocks on the game board. How well you score in a particular song will be all up to you. You can just coast and clear a few combos while you enjoy your music. You can play a song over and over, memorizing the block spawns and frantically clearing combos in hopes of squeezing out just a few more points to move up on those online leader boards . We hope the player feels the freedom we wanted to give them.

SG: One of the features of Turba that handily sets itself apart from other music based games is that it draws music from what the player already has on their computer. To me it would seem that a huge obstacle would be beat mapping. How did you overcome this challenge?

M&D: Oh lord. Okay just so you know, I’m (Jonathan) the one who did all the music stuff, so I’ll be able to explain the hell that is beat detection ;D . This was far and away our biggest challenge, and it was also the most important part of the game, so it had to be worked on as hard as possible. It has changed so many times over the last year. Just when you think you start to get it right, you play different songs and it just completely fails. I knew from the beginning (thankfully) that it could never be perfect, so that wasn’t the goal. I just had to come up with something that would work most of the time, and that would spawn enough blocks to make the game playable with any music. If anyone out there remembers how it was last year during the last beta, and they play the game now, I would have to say they would be blown away with how much better it is. I just recently started going through my library of music to test out the game before release, and I hadn’t realized how well I had actually done. I would just wait for my code to fail, but on almost every song I played it shocked me just how good it was. My fear is that anyone who plays the demo (coming soon) will play like, 1 song, and it will happen to be a song that just doesn’t work (I know they have to exist right?) and they will hate the game because of it. I’ll always feel proud of how far along I was able to take it though, and I’m sure a lot of people will appreciate it.

SG: The blogosphere is all a twitter with the whispers of PC platform being dead for games. Personally, I disagree and apparently to some degree you do as well. Where do you see the games platform going (or staying) and what made you choose the PC as a platform for Turba?

M&D: Buying PC games at retail may very well be dead. Buying games digitally through sites such as Steam is very much alive though. Steam has what, 25,000,000 users now? New digital distribution sites seem to be cropping up all the time (Desura is a new one in beta right now). Sites like these are making it easier than ever for indie games to be released to the masses. Our main reasoning to develop for the PC initially was simply because that’s what we know how to develop on. That and the costs to develop are extremely low, which is important when you have basically no funds.

SG: Do you intend to release the title for other platforms, like XBLIG (XBox Live Indie Games), Android, PSN and Apple’s App Store?

M&D: Well, Turba actually started as an Android game back in October of 2008. This fell apart in a matter of weeks though because as I alluded to above, we were only really comfortable with PC development then. I think if we ever got the opportunity our game would be perfect for the platform though, as well as the iPhone. We got a few business cards from people at PAX and we’ll be contacting them soon (among which was someone from XBLA). Who knows? Maybe something will come from that.

SG: You recently went to PAX East and walked away a happy team. You were selected as one of the showcase winners.In another interview you stated you were not surprised because you knew it was good enough to win based on success in other places such as 2beegames.com.You also stated that in lieu of surprise you had excitement. What is the philosophy espoused by Binary Takeover to guage a crossing of the line that takes something from “good enough” to “good period”?

M&D: Well you can tell something is good when you (the person making it) are excited and enthusiastic about it, and everyone you hear from on the outside expresses that they enjoy what you have made. This has been the case for us thus far. If we’re making a game, we don’t want to stop until we feel it is genuinely fun to play. Control and responsiveness are also two big factors that just have to feel right to make something better than “good enough”. You really need to have these qualities to make it into competitions like the one on 2Bee or expos like PAX, and it appears people think we indeed possess them .

SG: What do you think it the most valuable lesson you’ve learned from developing Turba and how will it apply to future endeavors?

M&D: Very simple and very blunt: FINISH THE DAMN GAME! This game has been in development since March of 2009. Now this obviously wasn’t full time development, far from it. In fact there were times where we stopped working on the game for weeks at a time. We were also dooming ourselves by continuing to add new features. There has to be a point where you need to say ENOUGH, and just finish out what you have. If you don’t you may never get done. Thankfully, we came full circle and were able to put together a final product. It would be a nightmare to spend so much time on something and not see it through to the end.

Now the good stuff – I know what you’re thinking – “When and where can I get a copy of Turba?”

Turba goes on sale at the Turba website for the wallet friendly price of $10 on Saturday, April 3, 2010

Their site states:

To those of you who were awesome enough to buy a copy at PAX, we will also be releasing a standalone update, which will bring you up to the current release level. We hope you’re enjoying the game right now! Thank you for your support.

There will also be a demo to go alongside the release of the full version, so get ready!

There is a saying: The most dangerous place in the world is between a mother and her child.

Perhaps this is because people unfortunate or plain dumb enough to place themselves been between a father and his child never survived long enough to say the same. People may like to think that they’ll get behave in accordance to ‘Law Abiding Citizen’ or ‘Taken’ on someone in that kind of situation. And people may fancy themselves as the type of person who can adamantly abide by the principle is always a vice.">Thomas Paine level of principality and consequences or if the situation called for it would gather up their “people huntin’ hat” and carry their own personal copy of Catcher in the Rye, but the reality of it is very, very different. The reality is that people often espouse the concept and practices of pacifism without considering that pacifists don’t make pacifism possible. They would rather forego their principles for the sake of societal appeasement. There comes a time in certain situations that we stumble upon an internal switch that doesn’t turn on, but turns off. The effects of that disconnect is as unique as it is unknown, for everyone affected.

Heavy Rain, a ‘game’ that pushes to redefine or at the very least question the manner of storytelling in video games will have a strong impact on many players. Nobody should say that there’s no replay value in the game and even though players will know how it starts and generally how it ends after they play it to finish one time, what happens in between is the bigger part of the mystery because a variance in those events shape the end in a number of ways.

In Heavy Rain, the impact of the events flip these switches in a moment, not in a slow series of pushes and pulls. The result is an instant, irregular fracture of the moral fibers in each of the characters and their resolve to do what they feel needs to be done. Enter the question: How far would you go to save someone you love?

One of the stronger underlying points in the game is laid before players in the birthday party prologue for Ethan’s son Jason. After being called inside for dinner, Jason’s younger brother Shaun runs upstairs and finds their pet bird, Merlin has died. Shaun blames himself for the death as his father consoles him by stating “Sometimes things happen even if we don’t want them to.” Shaun states that he feels, “It’s not fair”. Ethan holds him and says “I know… I know…”

It is here that the massive appeal for the game lies, waiting to make a calculated pounce like a hungry pride of lions on the one or two baby antelope too weak to keep up with the rest of the panicked herd. Things happen quickly and players are forced to commit to their choices through the entire game no matter the path chosen or resisted. The entire game is a proverbial ‘point of no return’ from start to finish.

Perhaps the greatest advantage Heavy Rain has over many other games is that it rests comfortably within a niche genre using strong story devices, familiar yet fresh control mechanics and does this all without making itself obscure or abstract. Dubbed “Interactive Drama”, Heavy Rain uses controls based on context sensitive quicktime events. The approach isn’t new; take for example the classic and obscure coin-op “Space Ace” and “Dragon’s Lair” games. Both games required input from the user as the story progressed automatically. The objective was to enter commands on cue in the order given; a really advanced and entertaining “Simon Says”. Heavy Rain takes this mechanic and builds upon it by adding extreme diversity in the form of more than a single point of view and avenues of approach within each vantage point while consistently working each character to the same goal along a cohesive and gripping story. QuanticDream applied the same methods within Indigo Prophecy successfully but Heavy Rain contains a more somber and melancholy chain of events and doesn’t focus on the people so much as it focuses on the event. One might say that the main character is actually the event instead of the people. It will tap and tug on the emotional heartstrings of people who allow it. Players are challenged to not rationalize the actions, but to make a black and white choice where an array of grey would normally reside.

This is another theme in the game that resides outside of the game itself – a silent breaching of the 4th wall by example, if you will. Through the course of the game players will undoubtedly feel as though certain actions no matter how they’re played out, make little sense if any at all. Why don’t characters see this, feel that, or act a certain way when it would seem normal to the player for them to behave differently? Because things only have to make sense for the particular situation and to the characters themselves; players aren’t controlling what their cards are, only how they’re played. Remember that these are ordinary people in an extraordinary situation, thus the rules of ‘normal’ do not fully apply.

The success of this concept is in how succinctly the players’ mind is taken off how mundane the actions truly are. Heavy Rain offers more than one way to complete a task without revealing beforehand what tasks have an effect on another or without laying all the options on the table before the player to choose from; players have to think about things as they’re doing them. Things normally rudimentary and taken for granted such as the relevance of what someone is wearing aren’t presented forthright, but come to reveal themselves later when the player often least expects it.

Eschewing traditional concepts of ‘win’ and ‘lose’, Heavy Rain grants players the ability in the course of the game to shape defining climactic moments. If at any point one of the characters dies, there will be an unanswered question, but it doesn’t constitute a ‘loss’ nor a ‘win’ – only a version of the ‘end’.

The bird in the opening act is an important device. Birds are regarded as free creatures – ‘free as a bird’. Sometimes the phrase ‘like a caged bird’ is used to describe imprisonment (a motif in the classic novel “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin and “Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton). In the case of Heavy Rain, the bird dying alludes to the idea that while that bird was relatively as free as it was caged, things beyond the visible pulled upon its life and outcome. Being caged was a controlled environment and as such those controlling it are responsible for every minute aspect of that livelihood of the bird; at least that’s the belief of those in control. When the bird died, what makes it unfair? Should the dead bird now be considered free? It was unfair because Shaun didn’t want the bird to die and while he knew that he didn’t directly cause the death, he felt responsible because like most people, things make sense when they can account for what is around them. If players take time to notice, the pet bird and the Spanish Pajarita on the game case cover is representative of one another.

To take this a bit further, the Spanish Pajarita with the four characters in the backdrop also symbolize a unified imprisonment. Each character is in some way controlled by their own vices. Madison and with her insomnia can only sleep in low rent motels, Jayden with his addiction to Tropacaine (a cocaine derivative with higher toxicity but less effect), Ethan and his depression and anxiety, Shelby and his drinking, and even though Lauren and Blake, while not a main characters were slave to certain lifestyles or mindsets.

The title “Heavy Rain” is important to understanding the game as well and goes a bit beyond the situations that gave the “Origami Killer” their motive. Events happen as tiny drops that add up over time. At first there’s not much to them, and in the grand scheme of things if each event were to happen to a different person they would be easy to handle. But the events happen to a small handful of interconnected people and build up pressure over a short amount of time. With each passing day these events occur harder and faster also adding to the pressure cooked life that Ethan, Jayden, Shelby, Madison, and the Origami Killer continually find themselves.

The characters’ survival isn’t essential to the ending, or at least an ending. They’re merely vessels for the “who” and “what” and the depth of ending hinges on them to some degree, but will the end be ‘good’? The answer largely depends upon a subjective definition of terms. “Good” and “Bad”, particularly in the ending isn’t definable in a way that most players would assume to look for them or cast an opinion of them without having experienced the game. “Good” can be manipulated in a fluid sense not dissimilar to a sense that water and air are fluid and take the shape of what contains them; character actions are influenced by the events, their environments, and the depth of explorations allotted by time which are in turn directed by order of operation. However, all of this is circular and complex, rich in the unfolding and very hard to calculate as things happen. If the player wants to have a certain outcome, they must shape the container and not the contained – once there’s an understanding of what events effect another, the challenge to recreate a process of the story and obtain an ending that the player would like to see instead of the one that simply ‘happens’ as is the case with the first play of the game.

If players want to be super lame, then they can stop a chapter, go back to the main menu and replay the chapter to get a particular outcome but it will ruin the impact of the initial telling of their particular story, so it is a strongly discouraged form of story manipulation the first time through. It truly cannot be stressed enough that Heavy Rain will lose a majority of plot impact if players forgo the integrity of the game via the aforementioned method.

Not long ago, debates were held across blogosphere concerning video games and art, and classic literature or poems and use of as source material. Heavy Rain poignantly evidences that games can contain a high degree of genuine literary art without having to resort to the use of borrowed material that gets bastardized for the sake of overlapping mass appeal and an ‘all mighty’ temporary industry divisive dollar. While everyone may not enjoy the macabre story, it’s not going to leave people in a ‘grey area’ about it and will serve as an example of what can be done successfully.