Some more Katamari lovin'.

The Katamari Damashii website has some fantastic wallpapers, and some paper cut out thingies that you can print out and make. Highly recommended.

Na. Na na na na na na na na Katamari Damashii.

Even if, like me, you can't read it; you should still be excited by this.

I Can See Your Doodle!

You've gotta love the expression on this guy's face.

Bugger

Now, this is probably going to interest an even smaller subset of you than even my usual brand of rubbish, but here goes. Personally, I think this is really bad news.

I loved the Madden NFL games back on the old Sega MegaDrive (the Genesis, for you seppos), but since the Dreamcast came into my life, I've only had eyes for Sega's 2K (and latterly ESPN) series. But now they can't use real teams, player names, logos or anything that'll make their excellent football series any sort of representation of the NFL. Does this really matter? Sadly, yes. It'll hit them really hard, sales-wise, right at the time they were starting to make serious inroads into the sports gaming market. This'll leave EA with a virtual monopoly, which'll mean that competitive pricing goes out the window, and then innovation is bound to follow. Having ESPN snapping at their heels the last couple of years has really pushed the Madden series forward, and it's bound to stagnate if that pressure lets up, given EA's past form.

But mostly, I was really looking forward to the new ESPN NFL game. I loved the last one. And, living in Australia, the only taste of the NFL (my favourite sport) I get is through the yearly Superbowl, and sports videogames.

What's Sega to do? My advice: make a superb college football title, and try to cut EA's grass that way instead.

Stay on target! Stay on target!

Alright. We're almost there. It's the last Monday morning of the working year. Just the next few days to get through, the office Christmas party on Friday, and then I get to enjoy two glorious weeks off. Ahh.

So, what's on the agenda? Well, firstly, I'm having a holiday at home, since the missus works retail, so will have to be within spitting distance of work throughout the festive season this year. That suits me okay (although I'm sure she's not too thrilled about it), since it means that we have a nice excuse not to go traipsing all over the country, spending money and getting stressed out trying to see everyone we ought to for Christmas. Instead, I get to sit at home, get some rest, play some games and generally take it easy and recharge. I've got no complaints on that front.

This time last year, I felt really optimistic. There was a bunch of stuff I wanted to get done in 2004, and I really felt like it was all within my grasp. Here's a quick recap:

1. Well, I got the game I was working on finished, on time. And I think I did as good a job as I could with it. On the whole, it didn't leave too bad a taste in my mouth, and I think its most glaring flaws can be laid firmly at the feet of the publisher and the licence. These are issues I identified in the first day of the project, issues we raised and were not allowed to address or work around, and now that the project's complete, they're the issues that reviews are (quite fairly) picking on. I think, however, that I did a good job on the bits of the project that were actually under my control.

2. I'm still in debt, though not as much as I was. I think I'm actually more or less on track here. I should be out of this by this time next year, with any luck, and it'll be a major milestone for me. I've done alright managing my money this year, even though the missus thinks I'm a pain in the arse about it. Honestly, though, there are few things as important to me than getting out of this cycle that keeps me more or less a slave, and takes away my ability to make choices about where and how I live, and what I do from day to day. The freedom that'll come with being out of debt is like some sort of beautiful dream - one that I'm determined to make a reality of sooner rather than later, even if it means I have to be a pain in the arse all year again.

3. One of the things I was excited about at this time last year was setting up an IGDA chapter here in Melbourne. That's something that took a fair part of the year to get up and running, and suffered a few hiccups along the way, but it did happen, and I think it was a fairly successful beginning. With any luck, we'll be able to really start to see things happen in the new year.

4. I was going to write a children's book this year. This never happened, sadly. Quite a lot of work was done on one, but it was abandoned, as it really didn't hold my interest, or that of the artist I was working with, so we decided to kill it off. I've got another idea for one that I quite like, so I suppose I'd better have another crack at it. Maybe over the holidays.

So, here's where I want to be at this time next year:

1. I want to be out of debt, preferably with a bit of money tucked away as well. This'll be tight, but it should be just about possible, so long as there aren't any unforseen disasters along the way.

2. I want to have written something I'm not ashamed of. That's always on the list. We'll see.

3. I want to be a bit less of a fat bastard. This will involve finding something active to do that isn't very expensive, and isn't a total bore. Suggestions on a postcard, please.

4. I want to be doing a bit better at work. I think I've had a really good year at work, actually. I've improved the way I do things a bit, and I also got a bit of a raise, with the potential for another one this coming year. Can't argue with that, I suppose. Still, I want to keep moving it forward, becoming more of a driving force behind what we do. I particularly want to earn the trust and freedom to work on some more original titles. Fingers crossed, eh?

5. I want to see the IGDA chapter grow and flourish this year. I think this one's entirely within the bounds of possibility, given how much enthusiasm I've seen and heard. I'll just have to be careful how I divide my time up, and I should be able to steer it in the right direction.

That'll do, actually.

The other thing I did this year was give up smoking. Twice, actually, but the first time was foiled by the arrival of the in-laws. This time, however, I'm confident that I'll stick it out.

Excuse the even more self indulgent than usual tone of this post. The end of the year will do that to you. I'll get back to rambling about videogames next time, I promise.

PC Gaming Is A Pain In My Arse

Gaming on a computer has always been a bit hit and miss with me. My first experiences were with the VIC 20 and the Commodore 64. Great games, for their time, but you either had to physically type in the game code, or load from a casette drive, which would take hours, and often fail. Plus, you had to type some gibberish at the command line to get it to work. But one machine was much like another, and if you tried it a few times, and remembered what your older cousin had told you to type, you'd be playing Ghostbusters or The Last Ninja or IK+ or whatever in no time.

Then came the age of the Amiga. This, to me, was the golden age of home computing. Not only did you have WYSIWYG word processing and desktop publishing and all that, and pictures that actually looked like something, but you had great games that'd boot right from the floppies that came in the box. They just worked. Which is something that was easy to take for granted, at the time, but an important feature.

The age of PC gaming, and "multimedia" actually saw us take a few steps backward, along with the forward leap home computing made around that time. I used to have three different boot disks, which I'd had to make myself by editing the config.sys and system.ini files that decided how my PC would use the 640kb of RAM that Bill Gates had famously claimed "would be enough for anybody", and then how it'd use the apparently superfluous other few megabytes it had floating around in there. You had to boot it one way to play X-Wing, and another way to play Doom. What a load of crap. If Magic Carpet didn't happen to support your particular graphic chipset or whatever, you were out of luck. And you couldn't return games, either. I never had to know any of this shit when playing console games, and I certainly didn't edit my Amiga's system configuration or anything like that. You put the disk or cartridge in, and you played the damned game. The machine knew what to do with it, when you put it in there, and the people that wrote the game knew what sort of box you'd be putting it in.

So, once the Playstation and Saturn rolled around (and later the Nintendo 64), I saw no need for PC gaming. So I used my PC for work, study, Internet, and all that, saved a few bucks when buying a graphics card, and thought little more of it. But memories are short, and I've started to drift back towards PC gaming. Half-Life and Doom2 are both games I remember fondly from the past, and it was the updates to these two classic franchises that lured me back in. But I don't think we've actually come very far from where we were in 1993 or so, sadly. It's no easier getting this shit to work than it was back on my old 486. Here are the main issues, as I see them:

1. I don't want to know the difference between OpenGL and DirectX. I don't want to have to figure out what sort of videocard I have, how much RAM it has, how fast it is, what drivers it has installed, and whether it supports hardware transform and lighting, pixel shaders, and what have you. And I'm a tech-savvy game developer. I'm no dummy - I *can* figure all this shit out. But when I buy a game, it's entertainment I'm after, not some sort of edutainment meta-game where I have to research modern graphics technology and trawl through all sorts of miserable forums filled with techno-geeks waving their e-penises in the air and boasting about how many FPS they're getting at 8x FSAA. To put it politely: fuck that shit. It's no wonder that consoles are killing the PC gaming market stone dead. Who, really, has time for all this? I've got to update DirectX, download the latest Forceware or Catalyst drivers, tweak all sorts of settings, while avoiding downloading anything that'll kill my computer, and then cross my fingers that the thing'll run? Madness. Let's also remember that if I do manage to kill my computer while fannying around with all this crap, that it not only stops me from playing the game, but it more or less kills my ability to be productive (work, banking, email and what have you) until I sort the whole damned mess out.

2. I'm not getting the same experience as everyone else. I know this, because I play the few PC games I've bought recently (Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Pirates!) on my work PC (which is a high-end machine) and on my home PC (which isn't). Playing Doom 3 at work is not the same as playing Doom 3 at home. Fundamentally, it isn't. It'll run just fine on both sets of hardware (and full credit to the developers here - that's no mean feat), but it's a different experience. Depending on the hardware you have, you'll be getting a larger or smaller subset of the whole experience the game contains. And you can bet it'll be different to the next guy. It's sort of like if you were reading a book and it got passed through Babelfish a couple of times before you got it. I mean, you get the gist, but it's not really what was intended. When I'm playing a console game, I'm playing the same game as everyone else. What's more, the developers had a chance to optimise it, and make decisions about what was important and what wasn't. It's not me making these decisions looking at a baffling set of sliders before I've even been able to experience the game, trying to decide whether soft shadows, anti aliasing, a few extra frames per second or whatever is going to make the game better, more playable, more enjoyable or whatever. How the fuck am I supposed to know?

3. Bugs. Alight, so console games have bugs. Everything's got bugs. But when you get a weird bug in a PC game, where everything glitches out and becomes unplayable, you can't take it back to the store. You don't even know who to ask for help, or what to ask them. I was getting a weird Half-Life 2 glitch, that was fucking the game up for me. I asked around, and tried tech support, and couldn't get an answer. Now I'm getting the same bug in Pirates!. So what gives? I update DirectX. I update my drivers. I check for conflicts. I read an arseload of FAQs and troubleshooting guides. I try different settings and configurations. No dice. Life really shouldn't be this difficult. If a console won't play the games that are designed for it, it's broken. You get it fixed, and then it works. But most PCs can be found somewhere in a vast grey area between "broken" and "fixed", and the amount your PC is "broken" varies from game to game. If the software that's designed for it works at about 70% of what it's supposed to, then you're doing okay.

What's the answer?

Should all PCs be built to standard "benchmark" configurations? No. Apple did well out of this model for a while, but even they've gone and fucked it up. PCs aren't built by a single company, and there's no one entity that could enforce this, or even put out meaningful recommendations. Plus, people buy PCs for all sorts of reasons, and being able to custom build one is a huge advantage. You can get all the stuff you need to do what you need to do with it, without having to pay for a whole bunch of crap that you don't actually need at all. Plus, having companies competing over CPUs and graphics cards and all that helps to keep prices down, and also makes for more innovation. Which are pretty positive points, surely?

Should we give up on PC gaming altogether? Probably not. There's always that bit of time where the current console generation is getting a bit long in the tooth, and PC gaming has a year or two to shine. Plus, it's a fertile ground for independent development, new ideas, online distribution, and all those other good things that eventually filter through into the console world. We hope. Plus, I can't imagine playing Civilization on a console. There are some games that are just meant to be played at a desk, with the mouse and keyboard.

So what's the answer? I dunno, to be honest. I suspect there's something to be done in the layer between the hardware and the application. Get on it, Microsoft. This new-fangled XNA thing had better be good, or else. In the meanwhile, I think I'll go back to ignoring PC gaming. I mean, I couldn't resist Half-Life 2 or Pirates! but just about everything else I can live without. It's back to the console for me - the world of push-button functionality; shit that works, even if you're a luddite or a moron; bean bags, couches and potato crisps. Mmm. Crunchy.

(Please forgive the long rant. I finished everything I had to do today about half an hour before beer o'clock, and I needed to fill in the time somehow. And those weird expanding rainbow textures in Pirates! have been really shitting me. Seriously.)

Eh?

I'm not sure that words can do justice to this image. I count at least eighteen different kinds of wrong, and around five flavours of hilarious. See if you can do better.

A Pirate's Life For Me!

I'm loving Half-Life 2, still, sure. But really, I'd rather be plundering the Spanish Main, like I used to in the bad old days. Well, 1987, to be precise.

The remake of Sid Meier's Pirates! (one of the best games of all time - no question) is a balls-out success. You should all be playing it right now. I insist.

Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!

The State of the Nation

Last weekend was the Australian Game Developers Conference. It all went pretty well, I reckon. Most of the audience seemed to be awake by the end of my lecture, and a few of them even asked questions. I was worried that I didn’t have enough material, but in the end I actually ended up going over time, and not getting through everything I wanted to cover. Which is actually a positive result, I suppose.

I met some interesting people, including Bill Roper (who’s CEO and founder of Flagship Studios, but best known for his work at Blizzard). I listened to a lot of speeches and did a lot of business card swapping and hobnobbing. I actually seem to have crossed over to the stage where it’s now more common at these events for me to be bailed up by someone else as it is for me to bail someone else up. Which seems reassuring, on some level. I’m lead designer at a medium-sized and well established developer, and now founder/coordinator of the local IGDA chapter, so I guess it’s to be expected. Lord knows how it happened, though, and I have to admit: it feels a bit weird.

It’s always driven home to me at these events how weak, in some ways, the local industry really is. It’s nothing to do with the talent – quite the opposite, actually, as the feeling across the board is that we’ve got loads of potential here. That’s what you hear every year. “So much potential.” And yet we’re used for donkey work, mostly – filling out a publisher’s marketing sheet with sequels, licenses and general shovelware. We know how to develop a game they can ship on time, within budget and to spec, but we’re never given the creative leeway that’s needed to go about the process of making truly *great* games. Which stinks. As much as people respect our reliability, versatility and general ability to get things done in a satisfying, above-average way – there’s nothing we make that has genuine fans. When are we going to get the trust required to be allowed to make a truly great, AAA game? When we start producing hits. You can see where this is going, right?

Every year, I hear people from Valve, Bioware, Ensemble, Blizzard or wherever describe how they make their hit games. And the common threads are that they can innovate with confidence as they have the timeframe within which to make mistakes and correct them. Usually, we don’t. If something’s iffy on paper, we can’t develop it. If something brilliant occurs to us while putting a game together, we can’t go back and flesh it out – we’ve just got to ship what we’ve got. These guys get to prototype, test, scrap what they’ve got so far, learn from it and start over again. They’re trusted to do that, because they make hits. But they’re able to make hits, because they’re allowed to take risks.

So how do we break out of the cycle, and start making better games here? I think we’ve got to squeeze them in around the edges of work-for-hire projects, sadly. To a large extent, Australian developers have to live from contract to contract to stay alive. And such an existence, suckling at the teats of indifferent multinational publishers, isn’t a failure or a cop-out – it’s actually a constant struggle and a huge success, if you can pull it off. The business isn’t an easy one. So, most of your key people are going to be busy for most of the year. If they’re not, then the company’s not going to stay afloat long enough for all that creatively productive downtime between paid projects to actually be of any use to you. So you’ve got to keep all the plates spinning still, and somehow find the time and resources to develop something for which you’ll assume 100% of the risk, and which may never come to fruition. Can this sort of approach work? Well, I’ll let you know in a couple of years, but I’m not sure I’m aware of a hit game that was produced in this way. Who knows, perhaps we’ll start a trend.