Games

I just saw the first batch of reviews on Halo 3. That’s amazing. I never though they would score that great. On top of that Bioshock turned out to be incredibly as well. It’s a good time to be a gamer. While waiting to get my hands on Halo, I wanted to talk a bit about a game that’s close to my heart:

Pokémon. Yes, you heard me right, the Gotta catch’em all one. Every time I talk to someone about this game I get the same thing.
- Pokémon? Are you serious? Isn’t that a children’s game?
Well, maybe, but it’s still one of the finest RPG ever created. Not many people around me have tried this game but the few I’ve managed to convince to try it out have never been disappointed, so I don’t think I’m wrong here. So why is it that so few people try it out? Well, I shouldn’t really say few people, with 10 million or so children (or Japanese people) get their regular fix with this game. But why so few adult gamers? Pokémon always score well on reviews with the latest one scoring 85%. This score should at least get people curious to try it out, but still I don’t see it. It’s definitely not a problem with marketing, since I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t know what Pokémon is. Still, no luck. So, what is it? Are we really so uptight and rigid that we don’t give something great a chance just because it’s a bit childish? Or am I just missing something?

Posted: September 25th, 2007 under Games.
Comments: 2

I managed to get hold of a game for the DS called Etrian Odyssey that I feel the need to rave a little about. I’m still not really sure that it’s a good game, but if you are like me and have grown up with computer role-playing games this game will definitely do the trick for you.

This game is mean in so many ways. It’s has a narcissistic save-system. It’s extremely hard and unforgiving. Early choices you do in the game have a huge effect on your chance of survival later on. Of course there is a kicker in there as well; you have to draw your own maps. Remember the last time you had to do that? I must have been 10-15 years ago. Ah, I had books and books of that sweet checkered paper. Well, of course the NDS helps you with the map-drawing things, and you do that on the lower screen, but it still captures that nostalgic feeling of exploration that is so hard to find in modern games. I also love seeing new creative ways (with a focus on creativity) to use the touch-screen.

If you never played those games back in the days. You probably should stay away from this game. But if you did, there is a good chance you’ll get hooked. I was.

Posted: August 15th, 2007 under Games.
Comments: 2

Since I traveled with a few Irrational guys on my short trip through The New World, I got a chance to see Bioshock in quite some detail. This game has been in production in almost four years, which is a very long time for a video game. Now, I know how developing a game for a long time can be from a developer standpoint, but I’ve never spent much though on how the world’s perception of a game can evolve as well.

Bioshock was introduced to the world last E3 and was perceived by many as the Game of the Show. This gave me great pleasure since the game was so wonderfully weird and original. But things seemed to go downhill after E3, at least from my perspective. For every new screenshot or video released, my vision of what the game would be grew further away from what I wanted it to be. This may not be uncommon, but for Bioshock it really drained my enthusiasm. I’ve been talking to some people at Irrational from time to time during this last year and heard their perception of this as well as some of the development issues they have been facing, which has been extremely interesting. It has made me realize how connected the perception of an unreleased game affects the perception of its developers, and how that probably affect how the game turns out in the end. Isn’t that something that is very unique with this media?So, what am I getting to? Not very much other than that after this trip, all my faith in Bioshock has been restored. It may not be the game that I dreamt it would be after last year’s E3, but Irrational have turned my perfect dream into something just as good. So, just as I did last year, I once again believe it will be great. Even one of the Great Ones. August 21 will tell.

Posted: July 10th, 2007 under Game design, Games.
Comments: none

As a final US stop, San Francisco was really perfect and took the top spot of my favorite city ever. I got to hang out with Jordan from Irrational as well as Steve from Perpetual which was really cool.

San Francisco is also the home of GDC (apart from a year in San Jose). I’ve never been there myself, but it seems to have become bigger and more interesting every year. Still, it seems a bit on the hefty side to charge so much for a conference ($1450 for a classic pass), and of course the total becomes much higher for people traveling from Sweden.

Posted: July 9th, 2007 under Games, Travel.
Comments: none

I think I’ve been to Los Angeles about 10 times and have spend about two weeks per year here the last 5 years. Mostly due to E3 of course and this will be the first time for a long time that I’m not going. E3 is quite different this year as well since they have moved it from being in the main convention centre into a couple of hotels in Santa Monica. It’s probably not a bad idea. Still, Leipzig seems like a very good replacement for E3 and is maybe more interesting since it’s for most part open for consumers as well. And you don’t have to fly for 15 hours to get there, of course.

Posted: June 29th, 2007 under Games, Travel.
Comments: none

My mom called me the other day. She had seen an article in Svenska Dagbladet where I did an interview about The Darkness (I found it on the web here). The article apparently took up a full page in the culture section of the paper. Pause to think about that for a second. A video game was given that much room in the culture section one of the biggest and most respected newspapers in Sweden. I’ve been traveling Europe and US a bit doing promotion work for The Darkness, and from what I’ve heard that is something that would happen in very few countries. We should be really happy that video games have become so accepted as a cultural media in Sweden. Or as my mom said, “You know, that is where they review Shakespeare plays!”. Of course, we have some way to go before games can be compared to Shakespeare and she also said “I almost missed the article, because half the page was covered with this really disturbing picture”. Well, perhaps next game will make mom proud.

Posted: June 24th, 2007 under Art, Games.
Comments: 1

These days I’m eagerly refreshing gamerankings.com to see when the first review will pop up for The Darkness. In just a couple of years that site (along with metacritics) has become extremely important to the games-industry. It took some time before the games-industry found a way to measure the quality of a game, but now it seems to be here to stay.So, why has gamerankings become so important? There are a number of reasons. The obvious is from a sales standpoint, where there seem to be a great correlation between the review score and sales, even though you still need a marketing campaign to back it up. From what I’ve heard some publishers have even started to write into the contract that if the game doesn’t reach this or that combined review-score, the developer is financially penalized.

The second reason is from the developer perspective. You are only as good as your last game and with a game taking two years to finish, that makes scoring well quite important. Especially for the smaller independent developers where it affects what opportunities you will get until your next game comes out (and not to mention the number of new friends you’ll get on your next game-conventions).

So, is it a good thing then? I think so. There are of course other ways of calculating a score. Imdb.com was a model that a few sites tried to use a couple of years back and I’m still not sure why it won’t work, or if it would be better. Also, there are some problems with the current setup as well, where budget titles and XBLA/PSN titles doesn’t really fit. But there is one thing that I think is really great with the current setup: It encourages innovation. Professional reviews usually embrace new and innovative things. Gamerankings effectively gives them even more power to encourage publishers and developers to innovate, and at this time when budgets are huge and risk-taking is minimized, that is something really valuable.

Posted: June 18th, 2007 under Games.
Comments: none