Buried within an interesting New York Times piece on how browser-based gaming is threatening the stability of traditional videogame economic models is the astonishing estimation from Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, that only 3.3% of Nintendo Wii games to date have turned a profit.
While there’s no direct quotation from Fils-Aime and the remarks are given no context (we’re not told if he was speaking to the paper or if they have pulled the information from elsewhere), the thrust of his argument is that the average Wii title needs to sell at least a million copies to make money.
While he claims that this is a lower threshold than is required for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 systems, according to NPD only 16 of the 484 games available for the system as of March 1st 2009 have sold that number.
The fact that nine of those titles are Nintendo-developed perhaps dispels the popular perception that the system has been a money-printing machine for casual game developers.
The piece also reports Reggie arguing that the lack of high-defenition capability in the system was a deliberate choice to help developers lower their costs and thus increase the chance of turning a profit, a plan that clearly isn’t working out.
Regardless of the accuracy of these estimations, their message matches the tone of this year’s Game Developer’s Conference which, according to industry prophet Raph Koster, reflected a concensus amongst attendees that “digital distribution models, UGC, playing in a browser, microtransactions, indiegames and web models” represent the future, while the “traditional publishers are dinosaurs in trouble”.
No matter how unfeasibly sci-fi OnLive’s claims to provide a Spotify for videogames might sound at the moment, the obvious hunger amongst consumers for such a service bespeaks a certain type of future that, one way or another, we will surely arrive at soon.
Johnny Kelly’s short animation, The Seed, mixes motion graphics and papercraft to chart the life cycle of an apple seed.
From being torn from the womb of a piece of fruit down through a maze-like intestinal tract and out through the winding plumbing of a Western town its a simple story told with style and restraint.
I love the color scheme Kelly chooses for his papercraft, bright eighties pastels set on brilliant white like an Uniqlo window display.
And if you think it was all done with computers take a look at this making of video for a glimpse into how it was painstakingly put together.
Tom Chick’s most recent column for Crispy Gamer gives a compelling defence of Ubisoft’s divisive voice-controlled Real Time Strategy game, EndWar. He identifies ten different design choices made by the game’s designers and explains why these choices work in the game’s favour.
What’s interesting about Chick’s column is that, at the end of his rallying defence, he illustrates how each one of his positive observations could quite reasonably also be considered a negative one.
For example, Chick considers that the small number of unit types in the game narrow its focus in a pleasing way, moving the play-style towards chess and away from traditional RTS army-building. But viewed negatively, this same design decision could be used as evidence that the game has little variety, a criticism often leveled at it by detractors.
The point that Chick illustrates here has wider application outside of his EndWar example. Games are defined just as much by what they don’t do as by what they do, and very often the choices designers make in that regard aren’t inherently good or bad ones.
For example, taken in isolation, the decision to give Alucard a double jump in Castlevania is a purely neutral one, just as the decision to limit 2D Mario to a single leap could not be described as a positive or negative decision without reference to a host of other design decisions within the game world. How high are the ledges he must scale? How much horizontal aftertouch can the player exert on him mid-jump? Without asking these questions it’s impossible to say whether the limitation is a good or bad thing for the game.
Sometimes a design decision remains a neutral one even when set against those other in-game factors. In these cases, value judgments become based upon other factors, many of which are removed from the game world.
For example, a player who derives pleasure from seeing a game that subverts genre convention will look on an unusual mechanic more generously than a player who prefers their games to submit to convention. Likewise, some players prefer their games to have narrow boundaries and deep depths while others prefer a gigantic but superficial range of interactive systems. In this way design decisions are accorded value by their player, often in ways that are distanced from the in-game experience.
Reviewers are subject to these influences just as often as consumers. Indeed, by virtue of the fact game reviewers have to play a great many games in a short space of time, these external factors can exert a far greater pressure on a reviewer’s opinion. How many writers fell for Portal, almost unconditionally, in part because it was a digestible 5-hour experience that lends itself well to concentrated play, nose pressed against a deadline? And how many reviewers dismiss wholesale Koei’s Dynasty Warriors-style output because they haven’t the time to distinguish the subtle differences, strengths and weaknesses between each execution?
In time it becomes possible to take a game product and write a damning review alongside a stirringly favourable one without threatening one’s integrity. You simply extract the facts of the game’s design decisions and then paint them as strengths or weaknesses, just as Chick has done here with EndWar and Kieron Gillen did with his three-reviews-in-one take on Boiling Point, a game which he scored variously 3, 8 and 9 out of 10.
I asked Kieron if he could give this three review treatment (one positive view, one negative view and another that balances the two), while maintaining a clear conscience, to any game.
“Absolutely,” he replied. “There are always good facts and bad facts in any game but no review contains everything. You have a generalised impression and then you match the ratio of facts you wish to present to your feeling of the game.”
Perhaps part of the issue is that facts don’t offer a value judgment, I suggest. A reviewer’s job is to look at the design facts and say whether they are good facts or bad facts.
“Yes. The question all gamers ask first is “Do I like it?”. The “Why?” always comes later,” says Gillen. “Design decisions can often be taken as good ones or bad ones, depending on how a player wants to justify their general feelings towards a game or a reviewer wants to construct a sustained argument. There’s nothing dishonest in that. I could write a 6-page feature on everything that’s wrong in Deus Ex. But my overall impression of the game is immensely favourable, so any review I write of it emphasises those elements that I love.”
Perhaps the most useful practice for a reviewer to learn, from a reader’s perspective, is to be consistent in approach and honest with their bias: to paint the blacks black and the whites white and to never to swap the brushes. Or, to stretch the analogy to breaking point, better still to use one brush and paint in shades of grey.
Despite being one of the most recognisable names in videogaming, there’s a sense in which the Final Fantasy moniker can do as much harm as good to a new title. To many gamers the words call to mind images of interminable winding adventures, capricious random battles, protracted cutscenes, juvenile philosophising and hermaphrodite heroes.
As a result, Square-Enix’s increasingly regular habit of slapping the brand on products that have little resemblance to their flagship series risks seeing these games dismissed by swathes of the gaming audience. How many readers chose not to click on this review simply because it bears the words “final” and “fantasy” and so couldn’t possibly be relevant to them, for example?
In the case of Echoes of Time this is something of a minor tragedy as the game represents a great many things that Final Fantasy does not. This is a snappy Action RPG in which storytelling plays second fiddle to Zelda-style puzzling and Diablo-esque dungeon exploration. Its USP – that Wii and Nintendo DS owners can adventure together simultaneously – is executed robustly and the finer details of the experience are crammed with creativity and sensible implementation. On that basis one can’t help but feel that the Final Fantasy branding might cost Echoes of Time sales it would otherwise have attracted.
As the latest member of the Crystal Chronicles suite of Final Fantasy spin-offs, this is closer in style to the mediocre Ring of Fates than the WiiWare release of mixed success, My Life as a King. It’s a fully 3D dungeon-exploring adventure with a heavy emphasis on item collection and equipment customisation. These systems are then tied together by a straightforward, childish story that’s mercifully light enough to not get in the way. Conversations are never drawn out and the cutscenes are brief, as indeed are many of the missions, ensuring the game’s suitability for portable play. Your quality of experience is going to be somewhat influenced by the platform on which you play (more on that later) but the game within is sound.
The arrival of a new generation of consoles is almost always seen as a good thing. With each new wave of technology we receive previously unimagined upgrades to our gaming experiences. Sprites turn to polygons, full motion video cutscenes make way for in-game storytelling and soundtracks once performed by Midi orchestras are now recorded by Philharmonics in Prague.
But the cost of this evolution is absorbed the game makers, those creators whose task it is to realise these machines’ vast but expensive potential. With such broad boundaries their games now take ten times as long to make and cost a hundred times as much they once did. The knock-on effect is that, perhaps for the first time ever, some genres are simply no longer feasible for anyone but the biggest players.
So it is for the Japanese RPG. Today the sort of winding 60-hour, world-touring epics that flooded the PlayStation’s library are prohibitively expensive to make, certainly costing more than the genre’s increasingly niche fanbase can support. Which series beyond the Final Fantasys and Sony-funded White Knight Chronicles of this world can afford the next-gen treatment? This has left JRPG developers with one of two choices: let their modestly-successful series continue to play out on last generation hardware as in the case of Persona, Grandia, Wild Arms and Valkyrie Profile or, like Suikoden Tierkreis, head to the handhelds, where the technology is still sufficiently restricted to make a long-form epic affordable.
Konami’s flagship RPG series has never been characterized by technological superiority, instead building its small but vociferous fanbase on gritty storytelling and a narrow, collect ‘em up focus. But despite the developer’s best efforts to make the most of what they have here, Suikoden Tierkreis is clearly a game made on a limited budget. As with the early PlayStation JRPGs, woefully basic 3D characters run about on still, flat CG background pictures. No matter how pretty these locations are – and the lush, green pastoral vistas have an inviting charm – pictures they remain, lending an anachronistic sense of disconnect between character and environment that never quite dissipates.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
Lord Northcliffe, who founded popular journalism in Britain, was a man in love with political power: he not only used his newspapers to topple one government (Asquith’s in May 1915) and to create another (led by Lloyd George in December 1916), he also got himself appointed as Britain’s Director for Propaganda.
His brother, Lord Rothermere, openly embraced dictatorship, declaring that Hitler was “a great gentleman” and ordering his newspaper, the Daily Mail to lockstep with British fascism. Well into the Second World War, his compliant staff were still campaigning against Jewish refugees seeking safety in Britain.
A few of this generation of owners used their wealth to protect and promote journalism, but most behaved like Lord Braverbrook, the model of this kind of proprietor, who famously explained his role as owner of the Daily Express: “I run the paper for the purpose of making propaganda, and with no other motive.”
Ah-hah. And everything begins to make a little more sense.
On the subject of the Daily Mail, this response to Richard Littlejohn’s recent, hate-filled column calling for the suicide of Sharon Shoesmith, is good.
While doing my weekly trawl for awesome videogame covers to post up on Chewing Pixels’ sister site, Box Art, I came across the obscure Famicom Disc System title “I am a Teacher: Super Mario no Sweater”.
Released in 1988, Super Mario’s Sweater was the brainchild of Japanese sewing machine manufacturer, Royal Industries Co., Ltd.
A quick survey of the game ROM reveals it to be a rudimentary sewing pattern designer.
The game offers fifteen save slots for players to create and colour their own patterns. The design interface, which looks a lot like the multitude of Picross titles available for Nintendo DS, works exactly like a pixel art program, presenting a grid of tiny squares which can be coloured in to build up a picture.
There are measurement markings on the grid that indicate the to-scale size of your drawing, important for making sure the Mario on your chest doesn’t make you look fat or something.
What makes the game unique is that, players could then upload their designs to a database and Royal Industries turn it into a sweater for a cost of 2900 Yen (£21/ $30). This would then be delivered to your house to the crushing envy of your friends and neighbours.
It’s one of the few instances where a virtual, user-generated object can be manufacturerd physical object via a videogame. The only other example that springs to mind is Harmonix’s system for turning your customized Rock Band 2 character into a 6″ figurine for $69.
“A Prinny is a small, usually blue, pouch-wearing penguin-like creature with disproportionately small bat wings and two peg legs where its feet would normally be. When thrown, it explodes on impact.”
Wikipedia, whatever its other shortcomings, can always be relied upon for obsessively detailed entries on bit-part characters from obscure Japanese videogames. The above summary, concise and efficient, gives the measure of the Prinny, a bird that has in recent years become something of a mascot for its creator, Nippon Ichi.
It’s debatable whether the developer planned for these creatures to become its poster-penguin when they debuted in the brilliant strategy-RPG Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. But since then, Prinnies have appeared in almost all of the studio’s games, providing comic relief from the serious business of statistical battling and bringing their own sentence-closing mannerism into the nerd lexicon, “Dood!”
Still, surely not even their creators imagined the Prinny would one day venture outside the confines of the strategy RPG to star in, of all things, its very own side-scrolling platform game. After all, Prinnies have peg legs where their feet should be and, more troubling, explode when they fall over. These are hardly the kind of idiosyncrasies that make for a suitable platform game hero, where jumping and not-combusting are usually baseline requirements for consideration. Then again, a pudgy plumber and a blue hedgehog made it. Perhaps a Prinny really could be the hero…
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
The anecdote about dropping an egg onto an in-sole is a highlight, as is the stark, efficient warning: “It’s the beginning of the end when you start to appreciate your own achievements.”
However, it’s the execution of the motion graphics that makes the video so effective. Economical yet impactful, it makes me wonder why we have so few videogames that employ an origami aesthetic.
* Cost of one Sunny Funny pink 7-inch vinyl wall clock (sealed) at ２丁目３番地 Toys&Collectibles: 900 Yen (£6.50/ $9)
* Cost of one Kobe Beef Steak (sans vegetables) at the Park Hyatt’s “Dramatically Perched” New York Grill: 19000 Yen (£137/ $193)
* Most expensive bottle of wine at the New York Grill: 345,000 Yen (£2500/ $3510)
* Number of Japanese words learned that, if spoken within earshot of a police officer while in public would, according to their teacher, land you in jail: 2
* % win rating at Street Fighter IV on Xbox Live this week: 68%
* % win rating at Street Fighter IV in Japanese arcades this week: 8%
* Number of Japanese words that might land you in jail spoken while playing Street Fighter IV in Japanese arcades: 52
Buried within an interesting New York Times piece on how browser-based gaming is threatening the stability of traditional videogame economic models is the astonishing estimation from Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, that only 3.3% of Nintendo Wii games to date have turned a profit.
Tom Chick’s 
Despite being one of the most recognisable names in videogaming, there’s a sense in which the Final Fantasy moniker can do as much harm as good to a new title. To many gamers the words call to mind images of interminable winding adventures, capricious random battles, protracted cutscenes, juvenile philosophising and hermaphrodite heroes.
The arrival of a new generation of consoles is almost always seen as a good thing. With each new wave of technology we receive previously unimagined upgrades to our gaming experiences. Sprites turn to polygons, full motion video cutscenes make way for in-game storytelling and soundtracks once performed by Midi orchestras are now recorded by Philharmonics in Prague. 
Lord Northcliffe, who founded popular journalism in Britain, was a man in love with political power: he not only used his newspapers to topple one government (Asquith’s in May 1915) and to create another (led by Lloyd George in December 1916), he also got himself appointed as Britain’s Director for Propaganda. 
While doing my weekly trawl for awesome videogame covers to post up on Chewing Pixels’ sister site, 
“A Prinny is a small, usually blue, pouch-wearing penguin-like creature with disproportionately small bat wings and two peg legs where its feet would normally be. When thrown, it explodes on impact.”
