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.

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.

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).