7 posts tagged “gama”

I looked at Gamasutra's list of their top 20 influential women and I was disappointed. The list was mostly of female executives; while I am happy to see that these women are climbing to high positions such as "executive VP of global marketing" and all, I was hoping for a list of amazing women who worked like crazy in the development trenches creating and innovating awesome games. The women were instrumental in the creation of original IP and exciting experiences. Here it is, in order of me coming up with their names.

1. Reiko Kodama. She was one of the co-creators of the Phantasy Star series of role playing games for the Sega Master System and producer for Skies of Arcadia. It seems like she does everything from design games, create pixel art to managing the production of a game. Considering how much I loved Phantasy Star as a kid, I consider her to be an idol of sorts. I dream to meet her some day.
   
2. Mieko Ishikawa. A composer and now producer at Nihon Falcom. She was one of the original composers for Ys, an action RPG franchise known for having some of the greatest music ever in a video game. Mieko continues to take part in shaping Falcom's products. Falcom is a special company for sure, making a good deal of money on live concerts of their music(I'm pretty sure arrangements of Mieko's original pieces still persist) and arrangements of their music that weren't in their games.
   
3. Minae Matsukawa. Producer of the Phoenix Wright series. She's worked office jobs, a security guard job and just wanted to get into games. She did so with great success and I admire her for it.
   
4. Rika Suzuki did game design for Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Trace Memory and the first 3 Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior games.
   
5. Kim Swift. Right from graduate to Game of the Year winning pro is a leap many envy. She was one of the members of a group of students that made a project that became Portal, one of the greatest gaming phenomenon of recent times. Props to her and the other members of the student team that Valve snapped up in a jiffy.
   
6. Amy Hennig. Directed Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver. I enjoyed this game on the Sega Dreamcast, and thought is was pretty darn groovy that a woman directed it. Props to her!
7. Rhianna Pratchett. Writer and story designer for Overlord, that amusing game of causing mayhem through a combo of action and real time strategy. Thank you for making lines worth reading.

That's it for now, if I think of any more, I will add them to the list.

Recently, I've become a fan of D3 Publisher. D3 Publisher of Japan has been publishing a series of game known as the "Simple Series." They're very low budget, low priced titles priced from 1500 yen(PS1 titles) to 2800 yen(Nintendo DS titles) and Playstation2 games at 2000 yen a pop. Not bad at all when you consider that full priced games run at 6800, 5800 and 7800 yen per system respectively. Not to mention movie tickets in Japan are about 3000 yen. The Simple 2000 series for the PS2 is freakin' huge!

In a Simple Series game, you're not unmasking layers of drama as you dynamically interface in a virtual confine with storytronics. You are playing a very straightforward, simple game. A lot of these are low budget knockoffs of full priced games that offer about 5-10 hours of game play a pop. The titles of these games are as straightforward as "Snakes on a Plane." For example, Zombie vs Ambulance. And The Crime Scene Investigator. The Maid Uniform & Machineguns. The R.C. Helicopter. The Block Crushing Game.

D3 Publisher has released Earth Defence Force for the Xbox360. The MSRP is only $40. The graphics aren't much better than a PS2 game, there are framerate/performance issues and there isn't a tremendous amount of variety to the gameplay. There's no online features. On the other hand, you do get 200 weapon types(only 5 of which I really find myself using) EVERY building can be destroyed, you can duck for cover, strafe around and the action is very accessible. Best of all, you can do 2-player same-console co-op. Oh no, co-op where you have to sit next to the other player! GADS! Sure, this is no Gears of War or Crackdown. You get what you pay for, you don't get what you don't pay for.

This interview with D3 USA is kind of sad. If you can't view Gamasutra's articles, Kotaku has a quick & dirty summary. No Zombie vs Ambulance for America. And Sony Approvals seems to be filibustering D3 USA's attempts at bringing the Simple Series to America in general. This is really sad. Why is a simple, value priced line of games so darn intimidating? Scared that your every day consumer doesn't care about all those budget busting features that you blew millions of dollars to implement? The Simple Series would most likely perish if it was subject to the same horrible retail distribution treatment that all games suffer from in the US. I've spent a ton of my money and I can't really justify buying Gears of War when I can borrow it from a buddy. Crackdown, while vastly technically superior to Earth Defense Force...Hmm, I'm just not interested in the extra sophistication the $20+tax brings. Besides, it's going through a patch to theoretically fix its horrible, Dead Rising-like save system that keeps you from getting all your achievements in one play. And heck, D3 could really use my support.

Dear D3. Bring Zombie vs Ambulance to Xbox360.

This is one of the most interesting reads I've come across in a while. Failure is one of the most fundamental building blocks of learning. Failure, and overcoming it is one of the most important parts of the human experience.

Trying to drive square pegs into round holes, testing the limits of friction and gravity making some kind of Tower of Babel with tinker toys or blocks. The list is quite long, especially if you think about it.

I had to design a few educational games for kids. At first, people were livid that I created "failproof" games. Granted, there were no "Game Over" screens, but I immidiately fired back that I had "fail safe" games. It's 100% possible to fail, but if players do, they're immidiately given another chance to try and succeed. That's a pretty big difference. Sheesh.

Opinion: Is Photorealism In Games The Right Direction?

Yeah, I realize this is an Opinion piece, but this time the messenger does matter when coupled with the message.
I don't think any of the games I've really enjoyed have vary many "photorealistic" properties.  Sure, you can see each and every stitch in the Queen of Ice's skimpy oufit in Enchanted Arms, but then, it's a skimpy outfit on a freaky magical ice lady that just wouldn't make sense in reality.

Betting on making something incredibly real is a big gamble in games. If your uber realisim breaks in the slightest bit, everything will fall apart. The world is not only non-believable any more, but this one break will frustrate the player and haunt the makers.

Let's put it this way:
Photo Realistic Okami.

BLEAGH....

How to Rip Off Japan by John Andersen, posted on Gamasutra.  This is really disturbing, knowing that Pop Cap -a highly successful company in America- is simply riding off the backs of other creators.  Furthermore, abusing the fact that the creators are foreign so they'd be less likely to find out about the infringements.

When I first saw Pop Cap Game's "Astro Pop" game, bam.  It hit me. This game is a shameless, ugly rip off of Magical Drop by Data East.  I played the living daylights out of Magical Drop III for PS1. There is a fine line between inspiration, concurrent yet independent development(cultures worldwide developing the same pentatonic scales without ever interacting with one another is an excellent example of this) and outright rip off.

PopCap's CEO doesn't give a [censored] either and Mitchell's CEO knows it.
"There are no pending lawsuits from them to [PopCap.] They have certainly told our partners about [the similarity] many times. Our position is that we haven't broken any laws."

It's a pretty fascinating read. Requries Gamasutra registration.

The amazing thing is the high percentage of women that responded to the survey. An astounding 76%...

"Women tend to be more in touch with their feelings and more introspective than men, generally speaking, so it's logical that when they're feeling stressed women would seek out some sort of remedy such as playing casual computer games," said Dr. Carl Arinoldo, a Stony Brook NY-based psychologist who advocates the playing of causal games as a source of both stress relief and cognitive exercise.

House wife stress is not a new thing; remember all those prescriptions for Valium written in the 50s?  Video games are certainly not as bad for you, unlike long term barbiturate use.  It's interesting that some people use video games as stress relief when games themselves can be considered a source of stress in ways.  I'm not talking about being flustered with bad game design or execution either.

As Dr. Kawashima Ryuuta certainly likes to tout, it's certainly a mental stimulus.

Fascinating article on cumbersome UIs posted on Gama Sutra.

Occasionally, Gamasutra can be good food for thought. I was never fond of the "clickfests" such as Diablo, Starcraft, and the author of this article hit a number of great nails squarely on the heads.  I suppose if people feel the need to micromanage, pick a tier within the chain of command to quickly navigate through individual units.  It's an idea, but is it really necessary? Especially to facilitate game play?

There are games out there that do make each unit count and make it fairly easy to command them. They do take the additional step of removing the real time factor.  With only 1 map and 16 pieces(which fall into 6 "classes") the turn based game of chess is considered one of the deepest strategy games.  Still deeper with a larger map(still just 1!) loads more pieces(only 1 class this time around) is the game of Go.

I'm trying to think of a game that's essentially a remake of RobotWar for the PS1. The programming was all done using iconic tiles, the robots could be upgraded with special hardware, hold more complex programs and new routines were obtained.

The point of this little diversion about simple, highly strategic games is for good strategic gameplay, one need not bury the strategy in layers and layers of complexity and require that micro management happen at hyper speed.  Making a tremendous number of split second decisiosn and having them all work towards a long term strategy is certainly a cognitive exercise of sorts.

I suppose a good exercise would be coming up with an RTS that follows goal I previously set of making every move count. I'll certainly think about it.