Operation Darkness!

This is just too crazy not to share. Sega is creating a turn-based tactical World War II game that involves werewolves, magic, skeletons, and godzilla-esque monsters all into one ridiculous package. Oh Land of the Rising Sun... what will you think of next? I'm not sure if it's going to get a stateside release, but here's a crazy video for you.

-Brad!

Golgo 13!

Golgo 13 for the NES. I think I rented it back in the day. It was intense for my 10 year old brain to try to handle some of the mature themes that were going on in there. There's an implied sex scene and a sniping sequence that had actual blood. Oh my!

ONLY YOU CAN HELP HIM SAVE THE WORLD!

I don't know if anyone else actually played this game, but the thing that sticks out in my mind is the terrible control scheme. Conventions had already been developed at the time of its release and yet the developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to map Jump onto the B button. There are only two effing buttons on the NES controller. Two. Every game in existence puts jump onto A. Mario jumps with A. Why can't Duke Togo jump with A? I guess he's too busy smoking and getting laid to be bothered with controller mapping conventions.

Anyway... let Golgo 13 be a lesson to all of us. If you're making an FPS right now please don't try to get cute and put Fire on the Left Trigger. :D

-Brad!

GAME FUEL!!!

Speaking of Hype Machines... take a look at that Halo 3 juggernaut that MS is rolling out. It's getting just a wee bit out of hand with all of those corporate tie-ins that are popping up. Pontiac, Burger King... wtf?

But then there's the Mountain Dew tie-in. I can almost forgive Pepsi for this hilarious can of GAME FUEL sporting the Master Chief. I've played a lot of Halo with a lot of 12 year olds on XBox Live. Most of these kids sound like they're chasing their Ritalin with Mountain Dew. So hats off to MS! Halo and Mountain Dew go together like a Plasma Pistol and a Battle Rifle. (nerd cred, son)

Although I am a bit scared of what all of that extra caffeine is going to lead to on September 25th. Prepare to be abused.

-Brad!

Hype Machine!

I just finished Bioshock. It was pretty dope. But was it a perfect 10.0?

Umm... no.

When I first started playing it I was having a hard time getting into it. All of the things that Ken Levine has said over the past year about revolutionizing the shooter genre kept popping up in my brain whenever I ran into a flaw. Bioshock is a good shooter. Shit... it's even a great shooter. But is it going to completely revolutionize the way we make shooters? Is it the effing messiah?

Umm... no.

But maybe that's ok. Maybe it's up to us as gamers to block out the gargantuan silly hype machine and just focus on the final product. Once I started playing the game with this in mind I started having a LOT more fun. It is a great game. Who cares if it's not going to revolutionize anything... it's incredibly polished, creepy, beautiful, etc, etc... and it should be recognized for this... I'm sure it's going to win a ton of awards this fall. It's more evolutionary than revolutionary... but that's ok too. I happen to be a big fan of just about everything they do over here.

I just wish that the Hype Machine wasn't so wildly and ridiculously hyperbolic when it came to games like Bioshock. Just tone it down a bit and I'll be cool with it. If your game is great, just believe in it and present it as work that you're proud of without all the rigmarole.

I'll leave you with this video that was passed around the internets... splicing some choice sound bytes from Ken Levine together with gameplay from Bioshock and older games that it... umm... "borrows" from.

-Brad!

Matchmaking!

Halo 2 is awesome. It's a great game. But it's not so un-fucking-believable that there should be millions of people still playing the damn thing going on three years after launch. How the hell did this happen?

One word: Matchmaking.

The dudes at Bungie are smart. Like wicked retarded smart. I saw Chris Butcher give a talk at GDC and I felt like there were angry fire ants inside my brain as I tried to follow his presentation. They made the first great fps on a console. But with Halo 2 they didn't just put a ton of time and effort into improving the game. They put an additional ton of time and effort into how you get into the game.

This is the part of PvP gaming that is so often overlooked. Developers are spending so much time on the game itself that they're neglecting how players find and get into games. Server browsing is old and stale and makes me feel like I'm rubbing two sticks together trying to get a spark to light somewhere inside the vast ocean of the internets. It's a total crapshoot... you never know what skill level your opponents are going to be and people are constantly coming and going from the server that the teams are rarely balanced. And have you ever tried to get 3 or 4 of your friends on the same server on the same team? Fuck that noise.

The Halo 2 matchmaking system is all about playing with your friends against random internet jackholes who are roughly the same skill level as you. That's the real key to the system. Forming a party, playing a game with static, relatively even teams, and then coming right back to the lobby with your buddies with voice chat enabled the whole time. It's brilliant.

Hopefully as developers get their next gen technology ducks in a row they'll start to have a bit more time to spend on additional systems like matchmaking. But until then I guess I'm destined to continue running around the internets as a space marine wearing a damned BMX helmet.

-Brad!

First!

Here's the first post for Controller Throw. My aim is to post thoughts about game design, the games industry, and some other crap.

A little about me... I have a degree from the University of Michigan in computer engineering. God that sounds so fucking pretentious... but it's the truth and I don't think I'm better than people that never went to school. Some of the smartest people I know didn't even finish high school.

I worked at Outrage Games on Rubu Tribe and Alter Echo, two games you've probably never heard of... I'm sure that part of that has to do with the fact that one of these titles never actually shipped. After the company folded (R.I.P.) I went to Wisconsin and did a very brief stint at Raven Software on X-Men Legends. Those guys are rad as hell and it was an awesome place to work, but I was offered a chance to move to San Francisco and work with Tim Schafer at Double Fine. So I grabbed it because... umm... hello? Day of the Tentacle? Full Throttle? Grim Fandango? Etc? I helped ship Psychonauts and now I've switched into the design crew here for our new title, which I can't tell you about for a while. If you ask about it I'm going to cut your face, because I'm from the suburbs of Detroit. That's how we roll.

Enough of that.

There are two kinds of game design blogs that I'm going to try to avoid being like. If you've ever read game design blogs from the internets you've probably encountered one or the other of these:
1) The blog from the kid who just graduated from Game Design College and has never shipped a game before. He's got a lot of big ideas but he has no idea how this fucking industry works... but oh man... he's played so many games and if they would only listen to him for just a second.
2) The blog from the arrogant asshole game designer who thinks that he's got this game design thing all figured out. He never misses an opportunity to point out why game X sucks and why he, like, totally knows how to fix it. He's also probably working on some industry changing idea... and it's probably related to Interactive Storytelling.

If I can avoid this kind of pretentious asshattery then I'll be a very happy person. If I can't, well... you can punch me in the face if you like. But beware... because... you know... that face-cutting thing... it's real.

-Brad!