Sean Howard’s new game design project is probably the most unselfish thing I’ve seen on the Internet.

Here’s the idea:

Every day for three hundred days, I will post a gameplay mechanic that has (hopefully) never been seen in a commercial video game. Three hundred mechanics. No more. No less.

And if somebody wants to use adopt an idea for their own game?

There is no way I can patent, copyright, trademark, or otherwise protect these ideas. I don’t even want to. I realize that the potential for exploitation is there, but I want to put these ideas out there to inspire others. If one of these ideas inspires you, go for it. Make it awesome. Just give me whatever credit you feel appropriate – if any. I’ll know where the idea came from. That’s enough for me.

Cripes! Of course, this wouldn’t be much good if the ideas weren’t logical, interesting or workable but, of the 22 examples he’s posted so far, it looks like it’s going to be a superb repository of creativity and brisk potential.

This idea’s currently my favourite – even if its USP is in the delivery rather than the mechanics.

Google, with characteristic understatement, have today added an extraordinary ‘Street View’ function to their already mind-boggling Google maps website.

Visit the site here, click on the ‘Street View’ tab (located in the top left of the map viewer) and you’ll notice a few of America’s larger cities (San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, Denver and Miami) switch to display a camera icon.

Click on any of these cities marked with a camera and you’ll zoom in to display a street by street map of the area. So far, so 2006.

However, any streets which are marked in blue have a new trick to show off. By dragging a little yellow man icon onto any marked street you’ll trigger a pop-up window displaying a 360-degree navigable photograph of that exact location.

Lines indicating any intersecting roads stretch off into the distance and, by clicking on these, you can make your way up and down the streets, a frame by frame tour of the district.

Goodness me, basically.

Finished!

Thank goodness for that.

The first Crystal Chronicles game, released onto the Gamecube in early 2004 was a package of mixed excellence.

Its visual symphony of joyful, expressive animations, picturesque and interesting environments and masterful, detailed character designs enriched a delightful multiplayer experience. However, with the tall requirement of committed friends, four GBAs and as many link cables on top of the usual GameCube setup, it was quite the hassle to experience it all as Square intended.

While the game enjoyed high praise from most critics and consumers alike close to launch, as the months rolled on a considerable backlash struck. Citing its rudimentary use of the GBA screen (certainly in comparison to rival Zelda Four swords) and the extremely weak single-player game, many players, given time, claimed deep and damaging flaws undermined its glossy surface.

Eurogamer pointed out some of these problems at the time saying ‘it’s just not a very good experience single-player’ and giving the game a 5/10 for the solo adventure. For many players the meandering storyline and those inevitable frustrations that come from sharing a single screen with three other minds soured what was really a very beautiful and creative game.

Despite winning the Japan Media Arts Festival Grand Prize in 2003 for their work on the original title, these criticisms have clearly not been lost on the development team. Rather than attempting a straight up evolution to the original game’s core ideas the company has opted to instead split the series into two streams: one focusing primarily on multiplayer, hosted on the DS, and the other focused primarily on single player for the Nintendo Wii.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Using the word Revenant to title this, the first spin-off videogame to Final Fantasy XII’s bright universe, seems something of a misnomer. With full-page advertisements in Viz this month proclaiming the original PlayStation 2 game’s arrival to Europe, the world of Ivalice has hardly been gone long enough to warrant a vainglorious comeback.

Nevertheless, players who recently uncovered all of Final Fantasy XII’s grand mysteries, but were left wanting more, will have no qualms with Revenant Wings so closely following on the heels of its illustrious parent.

But while the characters, locations and soundtrack will all be instantly familiar (the game opens in the Glabados Ruins before whisking you back to Rabanastre’s cosy slums) the core RPG engine has been stripped out and improbably replaced with some Real Time Strategy cogs and rubber bands.

This is surprising for various reasons, not least of which is the fact that RTS games are terminally unpopular in Japan, where the game has just launched. Prior to sitting down with a demo of the game, Eurogamer asked the its director, Motomu Toriyama, what on earth the team was thinking.
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“There’s a lot of excitement regarding RTS games within Square-Enix at the moment,” he explained. “With Revenant Wings we’re really looking to warm the Japanese up to the genre by making an accessible game based in a universe which they love. I believe there’s an ease of play to our take on the RTS genre here. It works really well on the DS but it’s certainly been a big challenge making it work elegantly with the stylus.”

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

On the flight back from Japan I listened to a few episodes from the ancient but still needle-sharp Radio 4 comedy panel show, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

One of the best rounds in the game show is ‘Uxbridge English Dictionary’, where panelists have to redefine English words in amusing but logical ways.

So ‘Bedlam’ becomes ‘a very favourite sheep’ etc.

Anyway, I thought Id have a go at a few and, if you’re up for it, why not add some in the comments. It’s quite addictive once you start.

Shoe-gaze – To scare away homosexuals.

Nipple – A Japanese date.

Dimple – A slow-witted date.

Mumps – Incontinent mother.

Humphrey – Over-generous whore.

Sycophant – Fed up with insects.

Damage – The side of a dam

Liposuction – Irish killjoy.

Hotel – Advising a hooker.

Beautifully – Minuscule beautician.

Over at rllmuk, a popular British forum for the more jaded videogame consumer, there’s a lively and noisy debate going on regarding the worth of scores as a shorthand summary for reviews.

It’s a recurring conversation across all artistic mediums – is it possible to reduce a carefully nuanced piece of critical writing down into a notch on a ten point scale?

If it is, then should all numerical scales of quality be comparable across different magazines and critics? Should 50% always signify a piece of work that is exactly average? Are bell-curves (where, for example, the mean average of all your scores totalled equals 70% rather than 50%) acceptable if your publication only chooses to review the better quality releases each month?

If cross-reviewing a game/ film/ book/ piece of music/ car for two different readerships, can a critic justify using different scores (or indeed text) for each? Can any review empirically quantify the quality of something or are reviews simply one particular group of people’s perception of the empirical quality of a piece of work?

Cyclical arguments which, while publications still choose to use scores, are probably without resolution.

Anyway, friend David McCarthy, who was deputy editor (iirc) of Edge Magazine when I first started freelancing for them, weighed in with a few observations. This one in particular I thought was brilliant – and, as nobody picked up on it in the thread, I thought I’d repost it here. Someone pointed out that scores are a universally misunderstood device to which David replied:

Well totally. They’re like Sudoku. People think that because they’re numbers there’s some sort of maths behind it. There isn’t. They’re not numbers, really, they’re signifiers. They might as well be smiley faces, or pictures of a sheep, or anything.

And reviewers aren’t just adapting their scores to what they think their readers want, they’re also adapting it to whether they bothered to play the game or not, or whether they’re worried about getting in trouble if they give a particular publisher or PR person a bad score, or whether they think their score will stand out against all the others, and if it does if that means they’ll get flamed by people and so on and so on. Which is why your metacritic example isn’t quite right: again, it’s not maths.

Metacritic will show if there’s a consensus. It won’t show why there’s a consensus. Maybe it’s because a game’s good. Maybe it’s because it’s because all those reviewers are trying to justify the price of a new console, to themselves, or their readers, or their advertisers. That’s why I can’t be bothered arguing about scores. There’s more to life. Like playing games, for example, and enjoying them or not enjoying them regardless of whether everyone else does. Or coming on to the internet and arguing with people about arguing about scores, obviously.

Guardian book reviewer and author of the brilliant Unspeak, Steven Poole added his perspective saying:

Scores are stupid. I remember when music/theatre reviews etc first had to be given “stars out of five!!!111″ at the Independent and the Guardian (only about 7 or 8 years ago IIRC), and all the critics and sub-editors complained that it was a dumbass, philistine thing to do. They were right!

Sometimes I see that one of those review round-up thingies has unilaterally attributed a score out of 10 to a book review that I wrote (book reviews being apparently the last bastion of good sense in this). That’s weird.

Anyway: yes, Edge should get rid of scores. I think it’s a temptation for reviewers to use them as a shortcut instead of writing a more nuanced assessment, and a temptation for readers to avoid reading what the reviewer actually bloody wrote. Imagine a brave new world of brilliantly written reviews without a number at the end. It would be like the TLS. But for videogames.

Food for thought. Anyhow, all of this came about because Margaret Robertson, Edge’s most recent editor, announced she was leaving the magazine at the end of last week. I enjoyed working both with and for Margaret (principally when she was reviews editor there). In fact, one of my favourite things I wrote for Edge, a long feature on localisation printed last year (‘You say Tomato’ it was pleasingly called) we worked on together (she interviewed Nintendo) and she totally knows her onions.

All the best to her in the future. In other news I’m back freelancing for them (at least for a forthcoming special edition) which is strange after a few months break. Whatever you think of the magazine (and I’m still a fanboy obv) as a writer something still makes me pause and up my game when writing for it. Maybe I should just relax and say it all with numbers.

The strongest evidence as to Playstation 3′s struggle in Japan at the moment is not the news that last week, for the first time, sales of the Playstation 2 surpassed those of its successor. Neither is it because Virtua Fighter 5 has only sold a disastrous 50,000 copies despite near single-handedly resurrecting Japan’s arcade scene this year with its popularity. Nor is it even that, as Parappa the Rapper’s creator Masaya Matsuura argued this week, the machine is simply too big and cumbersome for the Japanese home (remember how the country scorned the original Xbox for being so huge).

Rather it’s this: Dragon Quest IX is to be released on the Nintendo DS.

Dragon Quest is the biggest videogame series in Japan, a boast it has maintained for over twenty years. As such it is the twelfth best selling series in the world – an extraordinary statistic when you consider its poor performance and erratic, intermittent appearances anywhere outside of that country. When we say it’s big in Japan, we don’t mean in the sense that Grand Theft Auto is big in the UK. The closest cultural parallel we can think of to describe the populace’s expectation for a new mainline Dragon Quest game is the rush of Brits to pre-order a new Harry Potter book. In Japan, Dragon Quest is furiously mainstream in the same way that J K Rowling’s childlike fantasy reaches far beyond just the genre or medium’s fans.

As such Dragon Quest games are always, but always, created for the most mainstream (in terms of sales) system in Japan. Nintendo DS is that system and, in snatching the next major Level 5-developed Dragon Quest from the PlayStation family, the DS has demonstrated its domination.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Microsoft are understandably chuffed this week as their flagship racing game, Forza 2, has managed to score 36/40 in the weekly Japanese videogame rag, Famitsu.

Platinum awards in the magazine are few and far between – especially for Western-developed games – so it’s definitely a good thing. The company’s so pleased in fact, that they went to the bother of translating the closing comments in each of the magazine’s four reviews (Famitsu gets four writers to review each game and score it out of ten before aggregating these scores into a total out of forty) before posting them on the Forza 2 website.

Maybe something was lost in translation but this one really made me giggle as it reminded me of Affectionate Diary’s definitive review series:

“It’s a game that I really want to thoroughly play through. 9/10″

Totally brilliant.

Final Fantasy’s feathery mascot has played poster-chick to some of Square Enix’s most unlikely genre excursions. From Mario Kart style driving in Chocobo Racing, Rogue-like dungeoneering with Chocobo’s Mysterious Dungeon through to the Monopoly-style board game Chocobo De Dice there seems no limit to the situations and styles Square-Enix is able to crowbar the yellow chicken into.

United by a cutesy storybook style, the games in this chibi sub-brand have often been dismissed by critics and consumers alike as little more than pretty but shallow childish fancies. But thanks to the company’s seemingly endless ability (and pockets) to deliver rock-solid graphical and technical experiences and its insatiable curiosity to try its hand at other types of games from time to time, these videogames are more interesting than many gamers give them credit for.

So it is with Choboco Tales, a delightfully presented, technically robust, competent patchwork quilt of play styles that will likely put many off with its innocent looks. But don’t let the bold colours and squat, koochy Chocobos fool you; this is a diverse game with surprising depth and excellent writing that will appeal to open-minded players of all ages.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Butlins, during All Tomorrow’s Parties weekend, that indiest of independent music festivals, reminds me a little of Alan Moore’s Top 10.

His brilliant comic book series follows the lives and work of the police force of Neopolis, a city in which everyone (from policemen to civilian to animal) is a super-hero. It’s a simple but excellent premise. While everybody is unique, thanks to their different weird and wonderful superhuman abilities, nobody is really special because, of course, everybody is special.

ATP is the music festival full of people in bands watching people in bands. Often the only difference between those on the stage and those off seems to be that one’s doing better than the other – be it due to talent, graft or luck. So much so that, before Mogwai went on stage to headline Friday’s lineup, their sound engineer pointed at a couple of girls and black guy standing near the front and said: ‘Would you, you and you mind moving back a bit please. The first ten rows are reserved for white boys staring at guitar pedals.’

That’s kind of true. Of course the line-up and audience was, in actuality, far more varied. It was inevitably brilliant but tiring. I enjoyed most of the things I saw, with caveats. Subtitle was eloquent but unfocused; Band of Horses were friendly but unrehearsed; Cornelius was stylish but also a bit boring; Edan and MC Dagha were exciting but unvaried; Daniel Johnston was sincere but awkward; The Go! Team were fun but also a bit like redcoats with their (gasp!) requests for audience participation. Shellac were just plain amazing.

One thing I noticed more than at other ATPs was the constant rush to document everything by the audience. This ATP was curated by the attendees (in that we all had a chance to vote for the artists we wanted to see appear – hence why our names appear on the programme in the image above), but anyone would think this was to be the last concert any of these artists played so intense was the photography and filming. Youtube and Flickr are amazing, obviously, but it’s as if many people had to record their experience in order to properly experience it after the event. It made me want to never take a camera anywhere again, a bit.

Still, thanks to all the friends who were there and made it that much more of a sweet time. There are lots of cute (and terrifying) memories (some already lost to sleep deprivation – damn, should have taken a camera) but they were, and are, probably best left unrecorded.