Shards

Fire of Frustration

I've been playing Fire Emblem on my GBA recently (when not humming sea shanties), but I've got to the stage where I'm just going to give up on it.

There's two features of the game that are getting to me. Firstly, if one of your characters dies, that's it, they're dead, no Phoenix Down for you m'laddo! Secondly, if you don't take certain characters into certain battles, then you'll miss out on some of the bonus missions/characters.

This combination means that I've been stuck playing and restarting each battle so many times as a result of one of my characters getting jumped by an attack I couldn't plan against, or finding out halfway through that I should have brought the *other* blue haired character..

I suppose I could just play each level through quickly and advance, but for someone with my kleptomaniac tendancies in video games and a knowledge that you really are going to need all your weapons when you get onto the later levels in most RPG's, this is just not an option..

So I've gone out and bought Dawn of Souls instead... such a masochist...

The People Factor

New GDCTV video up today Nicole Lazzaro's "Why We Play Games Together: The People Factor"

Wow, this is excellent stuff. Not only does Nicole have a great presence and delivery, but she's presenting some really interesting research. For a games designer with a mechanics focus, like myself, this kind of research and opinion/advice is infinitely useful in evaluating products and features and deciding whether we're providing our users with the experience we want to give them.

Top Stuff

Not as cosmopolitan as it once was

From the latest updates for Guild Wars:

"Added language-specific districts to European servers. There are now different districts for each supported language: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Players are placed by default into the district that matches their current language preference, but can still travel freely to any available district or to the International District."

Ironically co-incides with the "No" votes against the EU Constitution in France and the Netherlands.

Though I can understand the merits of implementing this system, I can't help but think that it's a bit of a shame. Personally, I was quite enjoying having to interact on equal ground with players whose first language wasn't English.

Lumines to Europe

Hurrah! Ubisoft has picked up Lumines for publishing on PSP in Europe (via).

Along with Meteos for the NDS, Lumines is one of the great white hopes for those amongst us who are starved for 5 star puzzle-action games for the latest batch of handheld consoles!

I just hope that it'll be easier to find than a copy of Rez..

Oh how unfortunate..

Chortle...

http://www.capnwacky.com/sw/sw01.html

Will Wright hits the nail on the head

Gamasutra has an interesting feature up that present some fascinating tidbits from a panel featuring some of the world's foremost game designers.

I think that there are a couple of stand-out quotes, both by Will Wright:

“But ultimately, at the end of the day, game design is an intuitive black art, just like in any other field. There's a certain amount of game design possibilities that will forever be unknown, and that keeps things exciting.”

It also gives us designers hope that we might be the one to hit on one of those yet undiscovered nuggets of perfection.

Also:

“I'm still convinced that the best way to draw in female gamers is to hire more female designers,”

Now this is a hefty chunk of truth! No matter how "comprehensive" the research from our marketing people, there's no way that a team is going repeatedly create games with true cross-gender and mass-market appeal without that representative mix of opinions in the mix.

Speed Dating + The next generation

A combination of some spam from an internet dating agency and watching the Eyedentify trailer from E3 got me thinking. With all this online access and with both Xbox 360 and PS3 going to have camera + headset peripherals available and the latest calls to appeal to both sexes, how long will it be before someone attempts NextGen SpeedDating?

After all, isn't SpeedDating aimed at people who can't get a date? Doesn't this sound like a stereotype of a particular social group that might well have a NextGen console under their TV?

Trust me, it's the future!

Revolution Revelation?

There a few rumours flying around about Nintendo possibly holding a second press conference at e3 today at 10am PST...

What will they announce.. who knows.. but you get the feeling that there's going to be a few hours of feverish speculation before the Big N either blows our socks off or widdles on their fan boys' collective chips.

Tipping point?

Yet more calls for the games industry to broaden its scope and appeal to a wider market rather than just the traditional 16-30 male.

Okay, so I suspect that Mr Lowenstein's motivations for this preaching are more profit driven than through any genuine concern about inclusivity, but it's probably true that only the money men will be able to make the decisions about any future path for the industry.

Sadly, it feels like we're still not going anywhere. Every few weeks we hear from someone that we're in a mass market industry, that we're not just about the hardcore, that we're out to appeal to a broad cross-section of the population. But although our hardware is starting to learn from areas such as consumer electronics (360 vs iPod anyone?), I'm not sure that game design or production is on anything like the same wavelength.

So how can we solve this? How can we reach the tipping point where our past-time and passion opens up and truely hits home into the collective conciousness? Shouldn't this be what we're talking and reading about, rather than just producing our own individual rants that bemoan the short-sightedness of others?

Hmm..

There is another..

And lo, barely 2 days after EGN falls by the wayside, another event emerges to try and fill the trade show vacuum.

Taking place over the same days as GDCE, "Games Market Europe" will be held at the London Business design centre. They sound like they're trying to keep costs down as best they can, and so try to avoid the alienation and apathy of companies who obviously didn't want to support ECTS, EGN or GS Live. Sounds sensible to me, and offers some hope that we're not dead yet!