How to Not Suck At ZiGGURAT

| patrick

by patrick miller

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ZiGGURAT.

<If you are reading this strictly for tips on not sucking at ZiGGURAT, you can just jump down to the tip stuff here.>

I played a lot of Diablo II back in the day.

I actually didn’t get that deep into vanilla Diablo II, though. Beat the game on normal with a Conversion/Thorns Paladin, found myself woefully underpowered for Nightmare, and put it down until Lord of Destruction came out. That’s when I got addicted. Six months later, I had four high-level Assassins of various builds, a magic find Sorceress, and a Lightning Fury Amazon specced specifically for Cow Level runs. Yes, I made a character whose sole purpose was to mow down cows with alarming efficiency.

One decade later, I would reflect with some of my friends on our shared addiction to Diablo II. “Man, that game was addictive,” we said. Pause. Then I said:

“But, you know, it wasn’t really that much fun.”

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Occupy Oakland’s proposed arcade machine

| admin

spacer Occupy Oakland is moving into an abandoned building. While I have mixed feelings about being in an enclosed space (out of sight, out of mind), it’s true that people need to not be cold, and it could be an interesting place for discourse about homelessness, cooperatives, and everything the occupy movement is about.

It’s with that in mind that I direct you to this. Anna Anthropy (aka Dessgeega from IC forums/Select Button) proposes adding an arcade machine to the new space, and will make a new game specifically for it. To do so, she needs funds. Unfortunately, the project was rejected from kickstarter, and now has four days left to meet the goal of $2,000. If you felt like it, you could help make an original occupy game happen in a rather interesting moment in a massive movement.

Here are some words from the project organizers that you can read: “Every community center needs a game room to draw in the general public, to give people some respite and lighten spirits, and to give people an excuse to meet others in their community. And every good game room needs an arcade machine.

…if all goes will, the OAK-U-TRON 201X will be an official member part of the Winnitron Indie Game Arcade Network, showcasing the true, independent, DIY spirit of game developers around the globe!”

Patrick Miller’s Top 5 Games of 2011

| patrick

I joked to my fellow insert credistas a while back that I wasn’t any good at those weekly “What Are You Playing This Weekend?” staff poll pieces because my answer would be the same practically every week. Dark Souls? Call of Duty? Nope, just StarCraft 2, every week for a good 9 months or so.

Needless to say, I don’t play that many games these days. But I do play good ones, and I do play bad ones, so here we go: Patrick Miller’s Top Games of 2011, starting here. Note that I don’t really give a shit about things like release dates, so if you’re expecting a strict analysis of the 2011 videojuego canon, that’s not what you’ll get here.

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Disaster Report: real world events and the language of video games

| Hamish

spacer In the chaos of the Great East Japan earthquake, there was a story that understandably drew little attention. It’s a story about a small game development team within its publisher, Irem. The team makes a series called Disaster Report – video games about surviving natural disasters. Just after the quake, the most recent game, Disaster Report 4, was cancelled, and all the previous Disaster Report games were removed from Japanese shelves, almost without comment.

But despite the garish way they’re marketed in the west, the Disaster Report titles were really quite slow and respectful games. Their subtlety is immediately visible in the trailers and Japanese boxart, which is soft and innocent. They don’t promise the thrills or graphical punch of some games. They only promise that they will try and show you what it is like to be a person escaping from a beautiful and welcoming environment that has suddenly become hostile.

In the games, you try to help people, but sometimes they die. There may be something you can do about it, something difficult and frightening. But often there isn’t. Coming to terms with this is evocative – it is not great art, but it is sincere.
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The Anatomy of Hype (Or, Why You’re Going To Evolution 2012)

| patrick

I was a particularly nerdy kid, growing up. I was raised by a single Dad who was plenty nerdy himself, and I usually opted out of sports-related activities in favor of playing as many video games as I could get away with. I have this excellent picture from my 8th grade Little League baseball team. On the day where everyone got action shots, I asked to have my picture taken on the bench, math binder in hand, since most of my game time was spent there doing homework. (I’m pretty bad at math, too.)Never in a million years did I think that I would be the kind of guy to watch other people play video games, cheer wildly, and yell “OH MY SHIT DID HE JUST DO THAT”. In other words, I never thought I’d be into sports. Until I went to Evolution 2004. That mass of roaring people cheering Daigo on? I’m in there, somewhere.

I imagine that attending Evo is, for a few brief days, a taste of what it’s like to be any average guy with a beer belly, some gym shorts, and a profound devotion to ESPN. A basketball fan can walk into any sports bar in the world and mouth off about how terrible the Warriors are and start a conversation. They can watch The Big Game with a crowd of people and not feel self-conscious about spending their time watching big guys play with big basketballs. And when they’re at work, they can say “So, how about them Knicks?” and everyone else is obligated to reply with “Hell of a team, gonna go all the way this year” whether they pay attention to basketball or not. Well, fuck the Knicks. Here at Evo, the name of the game is MAHVEL, BAYBEE.

Basically, it’s a brief trip into a world where taking games seriously is totally fucking normal.

So! You’re going to Evo next year.
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Grasshopper’s Evangelion / 山岡晃の新たな終わる世界

| christian

Grasshopper Manufacture once did a lot of work for hire — the Shining Soul games on GBA, Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked for PS2 — but in its post-No More Heroes rebirth as an iconoclastic and very independent studio, it seemed likely those days were behind it. Huge publishers like EA (Shadows of the Damned) and Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment (Lollipop Chainsaw) have engaged the studio to create big-budget original IP. Why go back to making anime games?

Anime games like Evangelion 3nd Impact, released this week for the PSP in Japan by Bandai Namco Games. (“3nd“, by the way, is a play on the word “sound” — “san” being Japanese for “three” and, of course, the Third Impact being a big event in the Evangelion universe.)

Is it the stewardship of Akira Yamaoka, who has recently taken the title of chief creative officer? Is it just the way the Japanese market works, where studios rarely turn down paying work that in the west would seem undignified? It’s not clear, and unfortunately, I didn’t think to pose these questions to Yamaoka when I spoke to him at the Tokyo Game Show.

I was very curious about Evangelion 3nd Impact itself, however. It’s a music game based on the popular series’ recent Rebuild of Evangelion film series, which includes Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone, and Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance, and it came out this week in Japan. The Q&A, conducted at TGS, follows.

Can you tell me how the idea for Evangelion: 3nd Impact came up? Like, how you started making it?

Akira Yamaoka: So how it all started is that Namco Bandai, they just threw out: “Evangelion — is there anything that we think we can work on together?” And so Grasshopper actually came up with a few other concepts, including the one that now is 3nd Impact. “So an action RPG, and what about this music-based, rhythm-based game?” And from there on, everything just kind of moved forward.

Are you a fan of the original show, or the new movies, or anything?

AY: I don’t think I’d say that I’m a huge, huge fan. Not crazy about it. I just like it normally.

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who killed videogames? (a ghost story)

| tim

“who killed videogames?” (a ghost story)
by tim rogers

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Dan Froelich and his Yamaha FM chip

| eric-jon

spacer If I were smart, years ago I would have tracked down Dan Froelich and asked him what he used to write his funky CMF soundtracks for Jill of the Jungle, Solar Winds, Xargon, and other early Epic MegaGames stuff. Turns out I no longer need to, as he has written about his experience on his website. It seems he tracked his early game music in Adlib Visual Composer, a program that spoke to Adlib’s Yamaha FM chip (not dissimilar from the Sega Genesis chip) using a combination of piano rolls and FM instrument banks. Those elements were later crunched together into .CMF files for use with early Sound Blaster cards. To give a rare peek at the raw Adlib sound, Froelich has included clips of his Jill of the Jungle score, exported into ProTools. Cool beans!

So for anyone who wants to write early 1990s shareware music, that’s how the experts do it. Or rather, how an expert did it. I’m sure there are other methods.

TGS themes of the last 11 years

| brandon

spacer It struck me today that the official “themes” of the Tokyo Game Show have gotten weirder every year. I decided to research as far back as I could to find them all. We’ll start with 2000, when the show was still twice per year – I couldn’t find official confirmation for 1996-1999, so if anyone knows those, feel free to drop me a line.

Looking at the list, it seems that from 2009-2011, maybe someone new was in charge of the theme. That’s also around the time the mascot started showing up, and the English takes a marked turn for the unintelligible. But the first one in 2000 is no slouch! So, let’s be off on our gaming journey of heartful energy.

2000 (spring) Tokyo Game Show Evolves into the Year 2000 Version

2000 (autumn) The Entertainment of Your Life

2001 (spring) Entertainment in the 21st Century, Unfolded by Games

2001 (autumn) Let’s Play Together

2002 Playing Is in Our DNA

2003 A Playful Spirit Can Change the World

2004 A Brand New Sensation for Everyone in the World

2005 Your front row ticket to the next generation of gaming

2006 New Excitement. New Sensations. A New Generation.

2007 Link up, Reach out, To the World

2008 Ready for GAME Time!

2009 Game, it’s so energetic!

2010 GAME goes to a new chapter.

2011 Game-Dancing Your Heart

The future of Marvelous

| brandon

A bit ago I interviewed Daniel Kurtz and Toshinori Aoki for Gamasutra. The article has just gone up, and shows MMV’s bid for retaking the global market, as they merge with AQI. The trouble is, many of Marvelous’ leading creators (Kimura of Little King’s Story, Wada of Harvest Moon, Ohshima of Sonic fame) have left, as has almost all of the Nier team (thus, all of Cavia), and much of the company line sounds like the same old things every Japanese company has said for the last 10 years. Global (read: Western) expansion, fewer, more specific core titles led by MMV’s production team and developed by AQI.

I’ve said most of this in the gamasutra article, but here’s some bonus text from the interview, since I cut a lot of it out. The discussion below starts out from the company’s discussion of creating and owning IP at Marvelous. It’s probably worth reading the Gamasutra post first.
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