No(gaming)vember to remember...

Actually, it wasn't "no" gaming. It was more bite-sized gaming without leaving enough time to post thoughts.

And I was on the road for over 2 weeks this month (one week working on a game that I can't talk about yet; one week on vacation in Maui which does not lend itself to sitting down and writing at my laptop).

Things I tried (and plan to write about):

• Getting a "sweet move" to feel just right: Comparing the challenge of catching the perfect wave with the feel of a sweet double jump.
• My silly obsession with completing all the achievements in Plants vs. Zombies (and why it makes a great bite-sized game experience).
• The Torchlight demo -- and my possible return to hardcore PC gaming.
• My current Facebook games: Why I continue to suck at Backgammon and why I seem to be getting worse at Scramble -- but why I still love to play them.
• My crush on the official Modern Warfare 2 trailer (the one with the Eminem track that hasn't generated all kinds of controversy) and why it not only got me excited about the game, but also got my wife excited.

I'm also in the midst of doing a bunch of judging for a Serious Games competition (can't talk about it yet) and the Indie Games Festival competition. I'm done with the serious games part and am super looking forward to the Indie and student games competitions.

December is going to be a bit of a reboot month for me. I'm hoping to dive deeper into several projects I'm interested in working on and will report results here.

And, of course, the stream of retail and social/online games continues... I plan to play and write about lots more games.

I'm playing and working, but not thinking and writing...

I've been swamped with work lately (the kind I can't blog about) and will continue to be swamped for the next week or so. Then, hopefully, I'll come back up for air and do some more posting.

What have I been playing lately?

• South Park (XBLA) trial version. It's a tower defense game with some co-op components. My initial experience was "meh" but I think I want to try it co-op with Liza to see whether that is where it shines.
• Defense Grid: Awakening (XBLA). I started out quite liking the game and still do enjoy playing it. It's a little hard to pick up and play after letting it sit for a couple of weeks (unit recognition and ID is difficult at default zoom; maps are getting pretty big and unwieldy given the camera limitations). But I'm going to keep going.
• Lucidity (XBLA) trial version. Think Braid but with time pressure right from moment one. The initial challenge ramp is just a little too steep for me to truly enjoy the game -- and this makes me worry because if the game only gets harder it will quickly become too difficult for me to play. I like the music, mood, art direction, and style of game play. I just want to be able to relax and enjoy it a bit more.
• Need for Speed: Shift demo. It actually kind of sucked me in even though I don't get into sim racers. I should actually talk a bit about why this demo was much more compelling to me than the Forza 3 demo. I should also talk a little bit about their more "casual" control options.
• Lots of Scramble, Wordscraper. Some Sorority Life and Cafe Wars (for Facebook).
• de Blob. This is a pretty relaxing Wii game that I'm going to spend some more time with. Some elements of Katamari Damacy with other more Nintendo like games involving cleaning and painting.
• Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Clue Bender Society. It's a DS game that I've been meaning to check out. I really enjoyed one of the latest ND games (a more "casual" release) but haven't enjoyed the core PC offerings and am not really enjoying the DS game.

I've been getting a lot of use from my Raptr account. I actually need to add my Wii account to it as I almost forgot about my de Blob sessions. What I'm most excited about is that now that I'm about to descend into a mostly PS3 zone with the upcoming release of Uncharted 2 and Ratchet & Clank. I'll still be able to track and share my progress with friends -- most of whom are primarily Xbox users. Thank you, Raptr.com for integrating pretty well into my existing social network flow.

What else am I looking forward to playing, thinking, and writing about?

• The "Top 20 up and coming Facebook games". I'm curious to see what these social games have going for them.
• Some previous games that I've worked on. I really need to get a couple of presentations together based on the learn-to-play tutorials I've co-designed. Because these games are published I can talk about what we learned, what we did, and how to turn these learnings and doings into best practices. It will also give me a chance to play around some more with video-capture tech I've been sitting on for a while.

The first rule of working in the games industry is: There's never enough time to play all the games you want to play

Sigh.

After finishing Afro Samurai a couple of weeks ago, I haven't had much time for "big bite" gaming. My panel at Casual Connect went well (I'll post a link to slides when they're available) and I've been keeping busy with clients trying to get their games out for the holiday season.

My gaming needs have mostly been filled with "small bite" experiences. Mostly Facebook games like Farmville, Farkle, Scramble, Wordscraper, and Backgammon. And I've sprinkled in some short doses of Plants vs. Zombies (mostly playing through the campaign again and trying to harvest some new plants in my water and night gardens).

Scramble, Wordscraper, and Backgammon make sense to me. I love anagram games -- and I'm willing to play Backgammon with folks who want to extract revenge on me for beating them soundly at said-anagram games. I truly suck at Backgammon.

Farmville is one of those Zynga games that I'm basically playing as an exercise in learning more about how this kind of sim/god/world building game integrates into users' social networking workflow. Farkle is just a silly addiction that I can't seem to shake.

Seriously, though, it's time for me to recommit to gaming again. August is almost here -- and I wonder if I need to commit to a game (and a post) a day. It will be hard to pull off (I have a bunch of work and pleasure travel) but if I stay committed, I can make it happen.

• Keep my "at home" time restricted to console games (my coverage of both retail releases and marketplace releases on all three systems is woefully inadequate).
• Keep my "on the road" gaming confined to laptop, DS, and my wife's iPhone platforms.

I may even need to set up a spreadsheet and a schedule.

Maybe I'm on to something.

On the road again (and again...) and some self-promotion

I haven't been able to play much in the way of traditional gaming since, oh, the end of April because I've been pretty much constantly on the road.

Two weeks were all about fun and games -- my wedding and honeymoon -- but the remaining weeks have been bouncing around Chicago and Eugene (OR) working for a client with a game shipping this holiday. Oh, and then there was E3 week in L.A. But that was mostly a family visit.

In the mean time, I had a couple of panels accepted at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this summer. The first part is going to be a joint presentation by some awesome folks who have worked on a variety of casual and board games (including the inventor of Pandemic... How cool is that?). I'll be talking about my work on Catan for XBLA. The second panel will be a brief interactive workshop on how to improve your own on-site usability/focus testing. I'm super excited about putting this together with my co-panelists.

What I have been able to do is experiment with "microgaming" in the form of Twitter games. I can't say I've found the killer app, yet, but I'm guessing that there will eventually be some sort of microgame that captures my fancy to the same extent Scramble has on Facebook.

The Twitter game I'm playing most is called BeatMyTweet. It's basically an anagram name (a genre I love) where @BeatMyTweet sends out an anagram every 15 minutes and people RT @BeatMyTweet the answer. A link to results (people are ranked by time of correct RT) is tweeted and takes you to the host website. Not the best game in the world -- and I'd probably have dropped it by now if I weren't a fiend for anagrams -- but not a bad start. Some issues:

• Limited dictionary. Seems like the same words come up fairly frequently.
• Limited leaderboards. It's hard for an infrequent player like me to keep up with folks who are glued to their PCs or cellphones all day. I need contextual leaderboards that show me how I'm doing relevant to similar others. Unfortunately the current leaderboards only display top 5 players and there's no way to drill in further to see how I'm doing.

I've also tried Spymaster which is basically a Mafia Wars knockoff for Twitter. The level of visual polish is high, although it does suffer from some UI annoyances. Unfortunately this is just not my kind of game -- and it is far too spammy for my liking. I hate cluttering up others' feeds with some silly messages from my game. I figure my Facebook friends will tolerate occasional game feed updates (and can block them specifically without blocking me) but my Twitter followers will likely drop me if I send too many spammy messages their way.

My hope is to find a Twitter game that is compelling enough that it drives me back more often to consume interesting data from the Twittersphere and (hopefully) pipe more interesting updates out to my followers, much the same way that taking my Scramble and Backgammon turns currently drive my Facebook behavior.

Gaming on the sly: Plants, Zombies, And Yet It Moves

Travel. Between work and my recent wedding and honeymoon, I’ve been traveling a heck of a lot lately. Traveling so much that I haven’t really had a lot of time to sink my teeth into many games. Not surprisingly, my writing has suffered.

It’s abundantly clear that I need an iPhone. I don’t care to do the kind of research and amount of thought required to rent or purchase games for my DS. I want to consume games on my portable device much like I consume games on Facebook: See what’s popular, give promising looking apps a chance, and then either keep playing or move on. My biggest worry is that unlike Facebook the Apple Store doesn’t seem to support much in the way of social surfacing of games I might like. There are top sellers and reviews (both important things) but there’s no Xbox Live or Facebook Feed to help me discover what my friends are playing.

So, in the meantime I’ve been mostly doing my tried and true social Facebook games: Backgammon and Scramble. Lots of my friends also play Mafia Wars, but I just couldn’t get myself to struggle through the UI long enough to feel like the effort would be worth the fun. It still amazes me that I put up with some of the usability annoyances of Backgammon and Scramble, but these games are small and personal enough (I play mostly with far away friends who I care about) that the friction is not a deal-breaker. Really, in many ways, the games are glorified asynchronous chat clients. I hate talking on the phone or by email, so they provide enjoyable ways to keep in contact with people I miss.

That said, I have been exploring some new games. Specifically, I tried the demo of And Yet It Moves and purchased Plants vs. Zombies. I also briefly interacted with several educational "games” (and watched children play these games) at the Monterey Aquarium.

And Yet It Moves was a fun little demo. It was hard core in the way that Braid was hard core. Game play was reasonably intuitive once you “got it” but there weren’t a lot of learn as you play hints to prod you along.

That said, the designer did pay attention to some basic principles of layering and distributing game concepts. The player was not forced to learn every single concept in the first few minutes (only to subsequently forget them before they were needed). Challenges progressed from simple tasks that could be completed without penalty of failure to more and more difficult versions of the same challenge (e.g., penalty for falling to far; penalty for having object fall on you; penalty for taking to long to make a decision).

My biggest worry was that after completing level 3 (the final demo level) the puzzles would simply become frustrating instead of challenging. Why? Because the key vectors of challenge seemed to be (a) navigational (find the right direction to go in); and (b) reaction time oriented (fight the gross camera movements in order to achieve precisely timed and directed falls). The former challenge wasn’t interesting to me (this wasn’t a game about exploration in my mind) and the latter challenge seemed like it would simply become frustrating because the controls were not designed for precision.

Some other thoughts:

• Camera was pretty difficult to use.
  • It was virtually impossible to use until a friend told me I could remap the settings. This fixed my problem of always tilting the camera the wrong way.
  • I was also unsure why the camera movement was snapped to 90 degree angles instead of free move. I agree that complete free move may have been difficult to calibrate (sometimes you want to nudge the camera; sometimes you want to turn it 90 degrees) and I don’t believe that adding more complex controls (fast vs. slow rotate) would have “fit” the feel of this game. I guess I would have just liked to see a 45 degree snap version of the game to see if it was less disorienting to use.
• Occasionally it was hard to tell where to go next. I’m not talking about “how to solve the puzzle” but just “where in the heck is my next objective”. This mostly seemed to happen on the last demo level when the camera would zoom in pretty far. I felt like I couldn’t tell which direction I needed to go.

I did enjoy the game, but I’m not sure whether I enjoyed it enough to purchase the full version. I’ll need to look into it some more and check out pricing first.

Plants vs. Zombies, however, had a compelling enough demo to make me purchase it right away. Yeah, the strategy part was a little light… But the aesthetic was refreshing and pleasing and the production value was top notch. Moreover it is a relatively complete buffet of my casual game needs:

• Challenging RTS/Tower Defense modes for when I want to challenge myself.
• Fun and silly puzzles for when I want something less mentally taxing, but more addicting (time waster games).

Moreover, the time waster games served the same purpose as “grinding” in an RPG: These side games yielded points that could be spent to unlock special features in the core strategy game – which made the strategy game easier to win for folks struggling with the main progression path.

The topic of serious games is something that is gaining huge momentum. It used to be that you’d teach with TV shows and movies. These are now being supplemented by games. Interactive games are a great way for people to learn either individually or socially at their own pace.

Unfortunately the “games” that I saw at the Monterey Aquarium weren’t all that enjoyable as games. They were more like interactive exhibits with some surface features that made them seem like games (like computing a score or having a competition amongst 2 or more players).

Some of the key problems (please note I didn’t take much time to study the games, so I’ll need to validate these thoughts in the future):

• The games weren’t very fun.
• The games had usability issues.
• The games taught mostly simple concepts and did not focus on generating deeper understanding or engagement with the concepts.

Given the immense popularity of children’s social/community games like Webkinz and Habbo Hotel, it seems like we could be better harnessing both technology (more autonomous mobile devices for older kids; supervised computing for younger kids) and engaging game design to improve the educational experience of an aquarium visit.

• Children could generate quizzes for their peers to take. Give them a digital camera, a lesson plan of objectives, and a simple quiz generation utility (like the one on Facebook) and let them go.
• You could create either real life or virtual simulation and strategy games to demonstrate the effects of scarcity, environmental hazards, over-population, disease, and other factors on our ecosystem.

In some ways the list is endless. The tools for making games are becoming easier to use and children are becoming even more savvy at content creation and sharing. I definitely need to look deeper into the world of educational and other serious games.

Gaming on Virgin America: In flight games

So, I've been telling everyone I know lately about how much I love Virgin America. Great prices, connects me to the places I want to go, and a kind of cool/club-like atmosphere in their terminals and planes.

What I want to talk about in this post is their gaming console. Like Jet Blue and other airlines, Virgin America planes have display screens in the back of every seat. The cool bonus on VA is that there is a handheld game pad (with text keypad) you can use to play games. This is in addition to watching tv, movies, listening to music, or texting with other passengers.

Not surprisingly, there were some highs and lows of the gaming system. 

On the plus side:

• At least they're thinking "games". Kudos on understanding that games are one of many sources of digital entertainment that people enjoy in addition to music, books, movies, tv, etc.
• They had a modified version of the original Doom. Interestingly, I never completed the original (but beat Doom 2 several times). Aside for some quirks I detail below, it was pretty enjoyable and reminded me of what a great game it was.
• Not game related, but they had a "mature comedy" channel that played some vintage Eddie Murphy. I say "goonie goo-goo" to you, too.

On the interesting side:

• Kudos to VA for providing mature content. I hope they did it intentionally and are prepared for the eventual flak from "concerned parents" who witness other people playing Doom or listening to the potty mouth of Eddie Murphy. Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut? 

Things that could use improvement. Yeah, it's a long list, but most of it is pretty fixable. I look forward to dramatic improvements in VA's digital games offerings in the future.

The gaming console itself:

• The game pad doesn't have predictable functionality when driving the main user interface. For instance: dpad does not appear to control the mouse pointer; "a button" is not always select; "b button" is not always back, "start" and "select" buttons yield unpredictable actions; the keys on the key pad sometimes have functions and sometimes not; there is no consistency amongst games ("q" exited without warning in one game; did nothing in another).
• You can't listen to streaming music during game play. Whoops! I have to believe that this would be a much requested feature given the lack of music/audio in most of the available games.

The games, in general:

• They are alpha/beta versions of relatively hard core games. One of the games actually had the work "unix" in the title. Hard core. This means that they are not very accessible, are not paced in ways that encourage casual game play, and seem outdated and unpolished. Yes, they are "free", but there is GREAT free content out there. Use that instead.
• To take this one step further: There are tons of student and indie game developers who would love to provide content to VA. If they had a contest they could get hundreds of entries to choose from (and a ton of love from gamers and free publicity). Moreover, VA could set guidelines in terms of controls standards, quality, accessibility, etc.
• The absence of social features is stunning. I can send text messages with my neighbors, why can't I play games with neighbors? See leaderboards (real time and historical)? Imagine if while I'm playing the anagram game I got to see the scores of other passengers bubble up on a leaderboard. Cool.

I also have specific feedback on the three games I played the most:

The Anagram Game (forget the name): 

I love anagram games and consider myself to be an expert at them (feel free to challenge me to a Wordscraper or Scramble game on Facebook). I love to anagram all the time. But still, this version could barely hold my attention for various reasons: 

• No keypad support (holding your arm up for 5 minutes is tiring).
• Not balanced or paced in a way that made it exciting (cf. games like Word Twist for ways to do this properly).
• The dictionary was non-standard and confusing. OSPD, please :)
  
• The top right menu options were clustered too tightly together. This led to me quitting the game by mistake instead of taking a new turn a couple of times.
• Related to the above: It's probably easier (and it's certainly a better flow) to present an obvious "Continue" option once the player has completed a turn. 
• Ideally the player would get feedback on how well s/he did as well (either a grade, or a ranking based on leaderboards).

Mahjong:

I don't play much Mahjong, but I know it's supposed to be a relaxing tile matching game. This game wasn't very relaxing when played by the keypad:

• First, make sure it's obvious to the player that this is a touch screen game. I assumed I needed to play it via the game pad and didn't realize that it was optimized for touch screen play until we landed and I saw someone else playing via touch screen. Detect for game pad usage and prompt the player to use touch instead.
• Dpad select mode is jacked. You can only move the picker reticle left or right. Not up or down. This makes selecting tiles incredibly inefficient.
• Need to select a tile using the "enter" key pad. This functionality should also be on the "A" button.
• There is no sound effect feedback to confirm tile select, valid match, and invalid match.
• I quit by mistake by pressing the "q" key (while I was trying to figure out what theup/down control was).

Gem Drop X:

Gem matching games are insanely popular. Moreover, their design and functionality is pretty much solved in terms of basic mechanics. Variants are popular because they extend/refresh the basics. This game needs a lot of work before it can be competitive with existing titles in the genre.

• Left and right on dpad made sense (move my "guy" left and right), but why was "grab gem" put on down and "launch gem" put on up? It would have made much more sense to either have them both on "A" button (if you only allow players to grab one gem before launching it) or "A" to grab and "X" to launch (if you allow players to pick up multiple gems).
• The basic "valid match" mechanic was hard to deduce. It seemed like only vertical matches were valid (and not horizontal matches). But when you made a vertical match it also "popped" all similar gems that were touching (horizontal and vertical). 
• It was impossible to tell which column you were grabbing from/launching to. This is because there was no aiming reticle and there were far too many columns. Inevitably I grabbed the wrong gem or launched gems to the wrong column. Reducing the number of columns (see balance/progression comments below) and providing a target reticle would have helped a bunch.
• There was no balance/progression curve. The game started in fairly hard core mode -- wide screen of columns, failure on one level = game over, there was no sense of progression in terms of when new objects and powerups would appear, there was no feedback on when a level was completed. Ideally the game would start with many fewer columns and would layer on new objects and powerups as the player progressed. There should be "lives" so that players can progress after setbacks and ideally difficulty levels so that expert players could jump ahead to more difficult boards.

Doom:

I never completed the original. I had already beaten Doom 2 and the original didn't seem to run on my PC at the time. I spent about 15 minutes playing this game (after binding some keys properly, see below) and would have gone further had there been a checkpoint system (see below). I was reminded, however, of how scary and exciting the original was even though the graphics now seem so dated. The creature sound FX (especially when they are off-screen) are awesome. And the chainsaw and shotgun still felt great.

My basic critiques:

• Need better key bindings (controller mappings) by default. Once I properly mapped weapons select to the QWERTY at the top of the keypad, things went much smoother.
• Sound FX seemed to be missing for some pickups. 
• Need a checkpoint system. Yes, the original was a PC game where players were expected to quick save and reload all the time. But most people don't really play games this way anymore and you shouldn't be required to replay a whole level if you die just before completing it.

Afro Samurai, Skate 2, Hardwood Backgammon, Sonic Chronicles

So, I spent some time gaming this evening. That is, gaming in addition to the usual dose of Facebook Scramble and Turn Play Backgammon. 

First, I had to dive back into Sonic Chronicles, the DS game from Bioware. As I mentioned in a previous post, the initial experience was rather tedious and frustrating. Having played Bioware games for years, I figured I should still give it a chance as pretty much every one of their games has had a kind of grim first hour or two of game play.

Turns out that it got a lot more fun. That said, I'm not sure it's something I'll spend much more time playing for a variety of reasons:

• The IP isn't compelling enough. I'm just not a Sonic fan.
• I've played similar RPGs that have more interesting combat and character selection and advancement. I do like a 4 person party (with lots of characters to acquire and choose from). I do like turn based combat. I just don't find the character advancement, available skills and equipment upgrades, and combat options to be as well done and polished as similar other games I've played recently. 
• I really don't like the exploration mode: I want to explore the world as I would a platformer, not a pixel hunter. Yet because my movement input is a stylus, I am drawing all over the screen to try and get my characters to move where I want them.  Even more frustrating is the fact that my hand covers most of the screen when I'm using the stylus, blocking my view.
• That said, I do like the idea of using the stylus during combat -- both for QTE minigames and for target selection. However, there needs to be a clear visual and auditory cue when the player is about to be presented with a QTE. More importantly, the QTE minigames are not well calibrated, especially for the beginner.  The QTE need to ramp up in difficulty from simple to more complex. The QTE UI elements could probably be a little more intuitive (it took forever to figure out some of the "timing" elements -- and I failed many, many times without realizing why).
• I find myself skipping all the reading parts. I just don't see Sonic as much of a reader or talker and can't for the life of me begin to care about what all the characters have to say to each other. Maybe if I was more into the IP I would read more? I'm not sure. I read the heck out of Mass Effect ... It's not that I don't like reading dialog, but maybe I just don't expect to have that much reading in what I consider to be a platformer universe.

I also managed to play a few 360 demos.

I've played Hardwood Backgammon before, but decided to try it again given my new interest in playing Backgammon on Facebook. The Hardwood version isn't very exciting, but it mostly gets the job done and is certainly easier to use than the Facebook version. Of course, it does NOT allow asynchronous play (none of the XBLA turn based games do as far as I know), which is a shame. Taking my turn in various Facebook games has certainly been a key reason I log in so often -- and I have to believe I'd do the same if XBLA supported play-by-email options.

The highlight of the night was Afro Samurai. I loved the art direction and integration of comic book design into cutscenes. I think it really takes what the Penny Arcade folks did to the next level. Having great VO by Samuel L. Jackson doesn't hurt, either. Outside of combat the game feels very well written and polished.

As far as combat goes, I'm going to have to spend a bit more time breaking it down (the demo was quite short -- but sweet). Basic attacks and combos didn't feel quite right. I'm not sure whether it was my character poses/animations, the enemy hit reacts, the rumble, the camera, or "all of the above". There were some cool finishing animations and slo-mo attacks, but the nuts and bolts of combat vs. multiple enemies felt a bit off.

I was unable to figure out exactly how combos fed into my power meter. Truth be told, I was given a lot of functionality right off the bat -- and I'm assuming that the actual game layers these components on a little more slowly so the player can absorb them more deeply. Still, I'd like to know how I power up the "over" attack mode which functions a bit like Ninety Nine Nights orb spark (you dash quickly in different directions doing massive damage to anyone standing nearby).

Criticisims aside (and there are others, including: inability to switch options in the pause menu; inability to set the horizontal camera control to inverted even from the main game shell), the demo was tight. I'm not familiar with the actual source material (graphic novels or animated series) but I definitely felt like I was dropped into a world that I thought was cool and that I wanted to explore. Even though I have some concerns about combat, the demo left me wanting more.

Enough to buy the game? Not sure. I'm definitely bumping it up my Gamefly Q -- but we'll see. If I work on another action/brawler title, I'll definitely have to study it and Conan (which is also on my desk).

Finally, Skate 2. Not a genre of game I usually play for no reason other than none of the skateboarding games ever made me feel cool. The only extreme sport game I ever liked was Aggressive Inline. It had a pretty low bar in terms of accessibility, hot female skaters, and really cool environments. Basically, it was fun to skate and explore.

Skate 2 is another example of a game that is completely geared towards its (hard)core market. It was completely inaccessible to me. After 15 minutes of game play, I could barely stand up on the skateboard. Career mode left me stuck and unable to continue about 10 minutes in. The Freeplay mode started with a "bang" that meant every 12-15 seconds my character died and I had to restart. Whoops.

Although it hardly seems worth mentioning, I actually did bother to try to customize my skater. Stupidly, in retrospect, I chose a female skater. I should have known something was up when I got a dialog box asking me to confirm that I was sure I wanted to change the gender of my skater from male to female -- the default female characters were fuh-uh-ugly. Whoah. Freakishly ugly. Not just out of shape (though some of them were) but not even average in appearance. Hair, eyes, facial structure, you name it. The clothes were mostly unflattering.

Seems to me that character creation and customization is a pretty known and solved science:

• Start with attractive and popular defaults. At least have 2-3 presets that have "buy in" from some sort of art director.
• Add a "random" character generator button. Let players jam the button a bunch of times to get a sense of the possibilities and either accept one as is, or take one he/she mostly likes and tweak the rest.
• Yeah, it's cool to let me know that there are lots of unlockables in the game. Still, try to organize options such that it's easy to scroll through the currently available options instead of having to stream through pages of locked content.

In some ways I wonder whether the demo might have been better with the following:

• True freeskate mode. One map available as SP or as online play (can join/host). Default attractive skaters as playable characters (but allow players to customize from a small set of content).
• 4-5 self-paced tutorial modules. These could be executed as quests in the freeskate mode. Break down a few of the basic skills and let players practice them at their own pace -- not when under the stress of some arbitrary time constraint.

It's too bad (in my mind) that skate games are so hardcore. In my mind I still have the fantasy of relaxing while listening to music and skating around and exploring a cool world. Possibly coordinating stunts with friends like we did when we played co-op Crackdown. 

Maybe I can still hope for an Aggressive Online MMO. That would be cool.

Just tell me why can't this be love? (by love, I mean a great demo)

After watching a really terrible movie on the 360, I decided to cruise some of the recent demos that I have downloaded. Some of them were trial versions of XBLA titles and others were demos of upcoming console releases.

I spent a few minutes in each and will have to return to some of them for deeper analysis. But the overwhelming sense I got from the demos was "meh". None of them sucked me in from moment one. None of them filtered me into an experience that left me wanting more. And certainly none of them made me want to purchase full retail versions.

The demos I tried were:

• On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness (ep. 2)
• Resident Evil 5
• Tom Clancy's HAWX
• Three on Three NHL Arcade

So, 2 sequels and 2 new IP (well, reasonably new IP). 2 XBLA trial versions and 2 retail demos. A variety of different genres.

Were there any unifying flaws of these try-before-you-buy experiences? Not really.

In some ways, it was unlikely that I would really get into the first 2 titles. I've played previous versions of the games and just can't get into the core mechanics. 

• RE5 is great in terms of mood and suspense, but like Condemned, I just can't get into the claustrophobic game play. In some ways, I'm still not sure how I managed to enjoy Dead Space so much (given it's another plodding/claustrophic action horror game), but I never did finish it so maybe the setting and zero-grav game play could only carry it so far.
  
• Precipice is just too UI and word-driven. I love the use of comic strips to tell story (which has been used to great effect in other games like Max Payne) but I feel like I'm constantly waiting for another UI element to load or to quit out of a dialog tree that goes on forever. I never even got to explore the core combat systems. Given that I didn't get very far in the original Steam download, maybe the game is mostly about dialog trees and reading -- which isn't really my kind of game. I also found the world hard to navigate, the UI difficult to parse, and the penalty for clicking the wrong item is severe (you play the waiting game for the next screen to load).

HAWX started out with a bold (but not obvious) premise: To get players flying around in co-op mode with other folks. I'm always skeptical of this kind of experience (I hate playing with strangers for all the usual reasons) and generally skip demos that are MP only. But, ever since I had a blast playing through the Army of Two demo with a stranger, I've been more open to this kind of experience.

The basic flaw with the HAWX demo was that it had no real quick start mode that dumped you into a sandbox "fly around" mode. Instead you needed to worry about decisions like "Starting" a game vs. "Joining" a game (and all sorts of other options). Once the game started you were presented with boring tutorials that were easy to fail or skip by accident which left you stuck, having to guess what the designers meant for you to do to trigger the next sequence.

Unfortunately the co-op experience wasn't a great teaching experience, either. Unlike in a "walking around" game where you are in constant contact with other players and can observe and mimic their behavior in order to figure out what's going on, in a flight combat game usually other players are merely blips on the radar screen. 

There were other critical failings as well: Knowing that 50% of users will probably want to invert their camera/yaw, there should be an easy way to adjust this. The feature is buried under an options submenu that has jargonistic working with no useful help text. Moreover, there is no UI feedback to let you know whether your change registered or not, so I exited out twice without actually changing the option as intended.

But, when it comes right down to it, there is one main reason why I probably won't play HAWX again. Flying the plane is not fun. It feels slow, sluggish, and weightless -- all at the same time. Yeah, there's some rumble when I launch a missile, but I don't really feel like I'm flying a top of the line jet fighter. I realize that it's hard to simulate the kind of speed that these jets are capable of in a way that makes for fun game play. But, still, there are things that could be done to make the plane feel more powerful and deadly. At the very least, using the afterburners should rock my world and make me feel like I've got several g's of force pushing back against me.

Three on Three never really had a chance, unfortunately. I'm too big a fan of NHL Hitz (with 2002 being my favorite version). For a simple arcade game, they managed to make the default controls pretty darn awkward. I think that they violated the basic conventions of most other hockey games which made it hard for me to tell what was going on for the first few minutes (I'd switch players instead of speed burst, for instance).

The awkward controls made the game feel random, the weak team AI made the game feel like an episode of "chase the puck around", and the fact that somehow I managed to "win" even though the score was 0-0 at the end of the game still confuses me.

Sometimes I do wonder about the state of the traditional and console game industry. I know that there will always be awesome games out there (and I've been playing a bunch recently), but when I want to have a guaranteed relaxing and fun time, more and more I'm just firing up Facebook and playing some Scramble, Bejeweled Blitz, or my newest interest: Backgammon (by Turnplay). 

Housekeeping (and more Dead Space)

I took some time this evening to clean up my game queues a bit. I need to get organized as I'm falling behind and 'tis the season for decent new releases...

Dead Space is getting most of my console gaming attention. I have 2 friends who are playing Warhammer (the MMO) with some regularity, so I want to keep active with that. My Facebook gaming has slacked off a bit, but I still feed my D&D:Tiny Adventures addiction, play Wordscraper and Scramble with a couple of dedicated friends, and achieve the top achievement (cyborg) on Word Challenge once a week so I can impress my friends.

I really want to dig back into Midnight Club: Los Angeles because I love the game and it was starting to get to the really fun parts (cooler special abilities; cooler ways to pimp my cars). But, I'm backlogged on games I need to play for research purposes:

• No More Heroes, Alone in the Dark for a Wii game.
• Fable 2, Fallout 3 for an RPG.

And then there's Gears of War 2, which I don't really care much about -- except for the fact that everyone I know is going to play MP, and I do enjoy going through the co-op campaign on "insane" with friends.

I'm having a feeling I'm going to need to give up on playing through more of Half-life 2 (episodes), the Portal DLC, and GTA IV (which I was really starting to like).

I still need to play Call of Duty 4 and I just updated my "on my radar" section by replacing NHL 2008 with NHL 2009. Woof.

As far as Dead Space goes, I'm definitely starting to enjoy it more and feel like finishing it. It took too long to really get into the game -- and it wasn't until I basically decided to specialize in two weapons and just power them up that combat became fun. The game really doesn't support experimentation with different weapons because you die too quickly before you can figure out how to use them. The game also doesn't support pick-up-and-play because the controller scheme is so hard to remember -- and there's no in-game controller screen to remind you. 

Although I do wonder whether my main motivation to complete the game right now is because I'm over the half way mark, I think that the environmental and combat puzzles have gotten interesting enough to keep going. I do like the world, even though I haven't really been following the story. The zero-g portions of the game are pretty interesting and fun. It feels like it captures what combat in a true 3-d space would be like without being unduly frustrating. 

I've also started having more fun with the "grav gun" which can be very rewarding both in terms of item acquisition (grabbing far away things) and combat (firing explosive tubes or sharp body parts at enemies).

I still feel that the econ and upgrade system is clunky. Moreover, the progression curve is unsatisfying because instead of being exposed to cool new items and upgrades as part of the adventure (e.g., 1 hour in have the pistol; 2 hours shotgun; 3 hours machine gun) I just end up unlocking the ability to purchase these weapons without really trying them out first and seeing them in their best light. When my choice is between the unknown (which, when I first try it I fail at miserably) and upgrading something I'm already familiar with, I tend to go with the familiar.

Unlike other games that structure the experience around the acquisition of a new item (give me a rock, then surround me with scissors) this game presumes that you can decide which weapon you need based on a vague 2 sentence description. Then, after you buy the weapon, you don't have much chance to use it in a carefree way. The game is stingy about ammo drops and there are no sandbox areas where enemies (and items / money) constantly respawn.

Games like Ratchet & Clank do a great job of layering on new gadgets and weapons as part of the core progression path. They are integrated into the story and into level and enemy design. There's an economy backend that supports upgrades and non-critical path items, but resources are so plentiful that you're not really screwed if you end up buying something you don't like.

I'm basically sticking with the pistol (Plasma Cutter) and shotgun (Force Beam) and upgrading them and my armor. I don't even think I use the alt-fire on my Force Beam (I can't even remember what it is). I noticed that one of the achievements is to complete the game with just the Plasma Cutter. I actually don't think it would be that hard to do so.

I'll keep plugging away and hopefully finish it this weekend.

Quick update: Spore, EA shared content, and more to follow...

As I download Spore from the EA Online Store I figure I'll do a quick update on what I've been up to. I'll drill in more over the next few days.

These last few weeks have mostly been about social gaming on the one hand and GTA IV on the other. I must admit that I've really been loving GTA IV and can't wait to spend several more hours on it (hopefully today). 

Most of my social gaming has been on Facebook. I've already talked about Scramble and Wordscraper in previous posts. 

I've also been playing 2 "inferior" (at least in my mind) games simply because other friends play them and I can't convince them to make the switch. One is Word Twist, which I consider inferior to Text Twirl for the main reason that it doesn't force players to swap turns. This means that a player can blow through the game before any other player takes a turn. This makes the end-game less exciting (at least to me). The other is Word Challenge, which is a leaderboard game where you anagram words against a clock. The scoring convention is interesting and allows for some interesting risk-reward game play, but I think it's boring because there is no head-to-head competition. Well, there is... But I haven't tried it out yet because I prefer other games (and because I'm so far ahead of my friends they don't want to play me).

As I mentioned above, I'm currently downloading Spore. I have no idea whether I'll like it. The Creature Creator was fun to play with for a bit, but the novelty wore off as I started to crave actual  game play. What I'm most interested in is how Spore enters the social computing cloud of consciousness. With direct links to YouTube (and I've got to believe Facebook and MySpace) this game has potential to rock the SNS world.

EA seems to be pushing this idea very hard (and I'll bet effectively) with other franchises as well. I was cruising a Titans fan board and someone had posted links to movies of his favorite Madden 09 plays. Yep. The game offers players the ability to save and render out highlight films and then post them to the EA sharing site. The sharing site itself was pretty lame (no great way to surface additional/related content; no community rating system; etc) and it's a shame they didn't just partner with YouTube on this like Spore did. But it's a great step in the right direction for what people crave: Shared social content. Way to go EA!

These are, indeed, exciting times in the space of socially shared gaming experiences and content creation.

I'm not writing, but I am gaming...

I've actually been doing some gaming this past week -- just nothing that I can talk about due to NDA restrictions.

I've been fighting hockey schedule, setting up the apartment (moving into a new place with my awesome girlfriend), leaving my current job, setting up my new business... Lots of stuff.

Thankfully, my gaming "cave" is ready to go. I may even do some PC gaming to celebrate. Perhaps some Portal mods that I can't get on the Xbox 360.

Can't wait to dive back in and start playing and writing again. The Darkness awaits.

For now, I'm just pestering my friends to take their Scrabulous, Text Twirl, and Scramble turns. And I'll be playing some World of Warcraft: CCG this weekend, too.

Text Twirl: A decent head-to-head version of Text Twist

I'm a big fan of most word games... and an especially big fan of Text Twist. The basic premise of the game is to anagram various words from a 6 letter rack. You have a certain amount of time and score points based on the number of words you guess, with more points for longer words. You also get an "extended play" if you guess the 6 letter word -- after the round ends, you get a new 6 letter rack.

The game was quite fun and the 6 letter rack would get "harder" each round. One of my quibbles with the original game was that I couldn't tell what dictionary it used. Personally, I play a lot of Scrabble, so I like to use TWL/OSPD4.

Once of the nicest features of Text Twirl, a recent Facebook addition, is that it lets you select amongst various dictionaries, including SOWPODS and TWL. The single player game is also fully featured, unlike competitor: Word Twist which has a sub-par single player experience (you only get one round even if you guess the 6 letter word).

Like Scramble, I love Text Twirl because you don't really have to worry about all the cheating that goes on with Scrabulous. Yes, technically, you could cheat -- but because the game is timed, you really need to want to cheat as opposed to just being lazy.

Text Twirl's user interface is as delightful and easy to use as the original Text Twist. Simply type letters and press the "enter" key, or press Space Bar to shuffle the letters.

That said, there are a few quibbles:

• There doesn't appear to be audio feedback. One of the nice things about Text Twist is that you got audio feedback for "correct" vs. "invalid". This meant you didn't need to pay attention to the on screen text messages as you played the game. My one complaint with the audio feedback on Test Twist is that they didn't have separate sound effects for "already played" vs. "invalid".
• Once out of every several times I load the application I am directed to the "Start a game with friends" page instead of the "my current games" page. This is annoying because you get the "start a game" page (which is intended for you to spam friends with invites) when you are simply expecting to take your next turn in a game you are already playing. I see why they do this (and why Scrabulous can afford not to do this since it already has a huge active user base) but I still disapprove.
• Current Leader board functionality (like Scramble) is lame for the competitive player. The top players are so clearly cheating that it makes overall leader boards useless. One nice thing is that the Friends portion of the leader board has been better thought out than in Scramble. At least top scores are recorded instead of cumulative scores -- this rewards better players (who get higher average scores) over prolific players (who get lower average scores but play more games). Still, the experience is far inferior to my beloved (but sadly defunct) Griddle.
• There doesn't seem to be a current/completed game inspector where you can view individual boards to see what words you got/missed after the game is over. It's nice to be able to study old games and see patterns that emerge, but this simply isn't possible right now (all you can see are winner/loser and final score).

No time for BIG GAMES… But a little time for little games

This past weekend has been spent mostly not playing console games or keeping up with my Scrabulous and Scramble opponents.

But, I have been doing at least some gaming. The only Facebook "game" I seem to be able to play by cell phone is poke. I've been engaging in a weekend long poke war battle with a good friend of mine from the east coast. Basically every hour or so I receive a "poke" from my friend (experienced as a buzz on my cell phone that lets me know that a new SMS has arrived) that I then respond to by opening the text message and responding with the letter "p" to poke him back. It's mostly like a staring contest in that there is no real strategy. Mainly one person needs to either live with the annoying "you have been poked" status message at the top of his or her Facebook profile, concede, or poke back. Childish? Yep. But it still can be incredible fun if you use your imagination. In the current match, I know that my friend is going through a period of intense crunch time and is working pretty much 7 days per week. I know that while he's in the zone he only has short periods of down time to do a few "fun" tasks. And I think it's cool that one of those things he thinks to do is poke me from across the country.

The other game I played this weekend was Apples to Apples. It's a light-weight party game that is great on many levels. First, and foremost, it is easy to learn by jumping in and playing. Secondly, it is entertaining. Finally, the core mechanics of game play are fun enough that people can jump in or leave at any point and still have the same amount of fun (and doesn't upset the flow or balance of the game for the people who are taking it more "seriously"). The game is played with two sets of cards: Green cards (adjectives like "grotesque") and red cards (nouns like "Nuclear Weapons", "Macaroni and Cheese", and "Bruce Willis"). Each turn a judge turns over a new green card. All other players select from their hand of seven red cards the noun that they think (based on their subjective knowledge of the judge) will best exemplify the adjective. The judge then (ideally with elaborate and entertaining commentary) decides which noun wins, and the person who submitted that noun collects the green card and scores a point. The player to the left of the judge becomes the next judge, players draw to seven red cards, and the game progresses until a player reaches an agreed upon point total.

The LinkedIn game

Most of my gaming over the past week has been of the Scramble and Scrabulous variety. While I'm dominating in the former, I've found some serious competition in the latter.

I also explored some of the new features on LinkedIn. Specifically, they added a mini-feed that is very similar to the mini-feed on Facebook. I reckoned that I'd used the Facebook mini-feed to troll for Scramble and Scrabulous partners, so why not do the same thing to connect with friends that I'm LinkedIn with.

Obviously this is a professional social network, so I didn't want to embarrass myself or my colleagues who might not want to be called out in that kind of forum.

So, I posted to my feed: "Jason is waiting to hear back from Brian" (I forget the actual wording, but it was fairly innocuous and reasonably ambiguous -- I know several Brians). Of course, I did this knowing that the Brian in question was a huge LinkedIn player (lots of connections, posts on the forums, etc) and figured that even though the mini-feed was a new feature that he'd probably notice and respond.

Monday morning at 9AM I received an email from Brian. He thought it was hilarious and wanted to figure out how to set his own status.

Ah, social network gaming.

Scramble & Housekeeping

I haven't had as much time for console gaming lately. Luckily a couple of competitive Scrabulous players have started playing their turns more often. We're quite evenly matched and I hope that they keep their commitment up.

I've also been giving Scramble a chance. It's another Facebook application "in the spirit of" Boggle. It's no Bogglific for several reasons, but it possibly has some legs. A couple of the design decisions I question:

• Why are default games with friends multi-round events (5 boards)? Seems like this drags out games for longer than they need to go -- especially if one player falls behind and feels the lead is insurmountable (and thus loses interest and lets the game stall). Boggle is meant to be a series of rapid games where you're tallying wins vs. losses, not an epic struggle like Scrabble.
• Why is the online matchmaking done via lobbies? That's so 1990s and is really far too intimidating an experience. I don't want to choose the wrong lobby and sit around and chat. I want quick matches like in Bogglific. Sure, jumping in was scary at first. But even after a disheartening loss, you've really only blown a minute of your life and can quickly jump back into another game.
  
• I ended up joining a lobby for rapid games (with very short breaks in between). The flow was much like Griddle, which I wrote about a while ago. Very addictive. However you never really feel like you're playing other players because there simply isn't enough time for socializing (even a quick "gg") and it's not focused on the winner (another person) but how you ranked in the game, so it just doesn't feel like an interpersonal competition.
• The game also doesn't feel as strategic as Bogglific because there are no penalties for fake words. This means that often the best strategy is simply to hammer keys as fast as possible without caring whether you'll take a 2 point deduction. Moreover, because common words aren't canceled, there are no real incentives to scour for unique words -- it's all about quantity.
• There is no rating system (so you can matchmake with equivalent players) and the leader board seems to be restricted to your friends with no overall rankings.
• Finally, I'm pretty sure I don't like the credit system. You can apparently buy words for credits. You get credits by inviting friends to install and play the application. Basically this incents poor players to cheese out wins by spamming their friends with invites, which doesn't seem cool.
  

I'm curious to see where Scramble goes from here. Numbers seem a little low and I wonder whether they can up the player totals by moving closer to the Bogglific model. To me, Scramble seems much more like a feature-laden Griddle which means that while it is a good supply of crack, it doesn't have the same legs as a competitive game as Bogglific has (er... had before it shut down).

Other housekeeping notes:

• Tidied up my "Currently Playing" list. I'm trying to decide whether my next game will be Darkness or Call of Duty 4.
• Tidied up my "Want to play, but not enough time" list. I'll definitely play some more Gears of War if Brian and I are online at the same time. Sadly our east-west timezone differences make this hard to do. I finished off my Carcasonne single player achievements, so it's time to move on to some other XBLA fare. Maybe a return to Puzzle Quest or maybe on to some new games on my radar.