Calucci - The Game

With extremely high production values, “Calucci - The Game” is a promotional game for Dutch insurance company “Centraal Beheer Achmea”, taking the structure of 90s CD-ROM games. Thankfully sparing us the torture of Night Trap, this actually contains actors and is really well put together. You play a witness testifying against a mafia kingpin and have to escape a torrent of media coverage spawned by your arrival at your new home. Essentially a point-and-click - it consists of a number of interactive panoramas (QTVR style) joined together by video transitions. The experience is entirely seamless - its a great achievement to get such polish. The narrow possibility space encourages groundhog day nostalgia, but its the perfect length for a web game and even features a nice cuckoo clock. Thanks to the guys at Milo for the link.

Mr. Jump

Mr. Jump from DroneCorp is a faithful recreation of 8-bit British gaming, when games designers had the freedom to insert severed heads, toilets and jelly babies into the same game without criticism. Mr. Jump is out there to silence you crybabys weaned on Marios physics-defying ability to change direction in the air. Matthew Smith would be proud.

Nice to see some innovation in the Tony Hawk’s series, as demonstrated in the new release - Tony Hawk’s Project 8 (turns out the the codename became the final name). After years of flailing, filling the game with pointless features, appalling jackass “tribute” humour and shocking polish, it looks like the series is hoping to recover what was so special about the PSone release.

The most notable innovation in this release is “Nail the Trick”. While it might seem like a copy-paste implementation of bullet-time for skateboarding, I think its really well applied in this case. Game theorists love to namecheck phychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, and how this exceptional mental state is found when a person performs at the peak of their ability. Time effectively stops, and everything around you is forgotten as you focus entirely on the activity you are performing so well. This is a mental phenomenon particularly found in athletes (”in the zone”) and players of video games. Well it seems that Neversoft are determined to create some kind of psychological feedback loop and now the game attempts to replicate the sensation of flow within the game.

Personally I think it works wonderfully, and its a great addition to the game, and takes it back to where the series belongs - making you feel like a pro-skateboarder.

In one of the saddest bits of games news in recent years, Clover Studios are being closed by Capcom. The move is obviously purely financial - the output of Clover has been consistently excellent, peaking with the startling originality of the critically-acclaimed “Okami”. I’ve been playing Okami for about a week and I’m in love (writeup soon), and for the fertile soil from which it grew to be broken up is utterly crushing. There is a good write-up on GamesIndustry.biz why this has happened and the implications to the industry.

The GamesIndustry.biz article puts forward some suggestions as to why projects such as Clover Studios (created by Capcom as a kind of creativity incubator) are rare. While the financial loss is not insubstancial (around £2million), it is small compared to the budgets of many next-gen games and its short-sighted to close the studio down just as it was hitting its stride. Clover had obviously attracted a hugely talented team - producing a visually stunning game for an ageing platform. Okami is also the only game that I’ve seen that has come close to competing with Zelda’s action adventure dominance (although admittedly this may come from wholesale borrowing of structural and design elements). When you have such talent at your disposal, the next step should logically be to find ways of optimising their output, to find ways of working with the marketing and financial elements to make them turn a profit. As the gamesindustry article points out, Clover’s creative focus may have ultimately led to the creation of a brand-new genre or (a much needed) hugely successful franchise and while they were brave in establishing the studio in the first place, its hugely sad that they could not see it through.

Another point made by the article is the lack of love for games that is obviously so evident amongst games industry executives when compared with the movie industry. While movie execs are proud to be part of the culture and to sing the creative achievements, many game execs rarely play games themselves, other than to familiarise themselves with their own products. The reason for a lack of a desire to produce innovative content is perhaps a distinct lack of love for the medium - games become simply products to shift. While this may occur in some sectors of the movie industry (most obviously the summer blockbuster) there is enough support for the smaller, quirkier films that a balanced is reached.

I’ve decided to create an open-source flash library. Mainly this is to help me get organised with the reams of code I’ve written over the years, but will hopefully be of use to some people besides myself. In the tradition of giving libraries pointless names, this one will be called “Wilberforce” for AS2 and something I’ve not yet decided for AS3. There will also be a bunch of JSAPI tricks in there. You can have a look at the project here, although bear in mind theres very little there so far, and much of the code is slightly broken for now:

“hc_flash_base Project” on Google Code

I’m using google code’s new free subversion hosting, which seems pretty nifty so far.

If anyone of you want to contribute, you’re more than welcome.

The spiritual heir to Terry Gilliam, Cyriak is clearly a major contributor to b3ta. This reel of a lof of his animations glued together is staggering.

Assist is a wonderful implementation of a physics toy, created by the Design Rationale team at MIT. The tool provides a simple sketching interface, allowing you to draw 2D physical bodies, and manipulate them by creating, springs, pins and gravity. Its a great playset to play with, and would be great within a classroom environment.

The software was taken further by Microsoft, and adopted as a PowerToy for the Tablet PC, and named “Physics Illustrator” which you can download here (Requires a Tablet PC). You can even grab the source code from Microsoft Research here (C#, can be run on a non-tablet PC).

Thanks again fun-motion for the initial heads-up

Imperial college hosted a two-part seminar on Wednesday entitled “The Future of game A.I.” as part of London Games Week. The aim of the seminar was to bridge the gap between A.I. research within academia and the current and future requirements of A.I. within games. It consisted of two parts: the first was a daytime session for the academics and industry professionals to get together and bash heads, and the second was a public discussion of the days findings and presentations from some of the game industry professionals and academics involved. The three speakers were Peter Molyneux (founder of lionhead, father of all god games), Marc Cavazza of the University of Teeside, and Simon Colton of Imperial college’s Combined Reasoning Group.

(Full writeup after the fold)
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Theres a nice collection of Second Life related things to look at that have appeared over the past week or so. My second life experiences have not hit anywhere the obsessive scale yet - I think I’m slightly afraid of what would happen to me after watching the latest South Park. Anyway, without further ado:

Alice “Wonderland” Taylor’s writeup of Philip Rosedale’s presentation at Picnic ‘06 in Amsterdam. Alice’s writeup’s are always the best out there. She must have very nimble fingers.

Channel 4’s “Second Lives” series of films. I’m sure these are up on youtube, I’ll have a look in a mo and update this post if I find them.

James Wagner Au (embedded second life journo for quite some time)’s presentation from Knock Knock (only up for another week apparently).

Theres a nice little post on The Cool Hunter covering cool kids spaces. There is a significant overlap between architecture and game design (especially level/world design). Since “Katamari Damacy” creator Keita Takahashi’s open wish to create a playground for kids, and Will Wright’s declaration of the relevance of architecture within the design of interactive entertainment, it seems to be drawing the attention of more and more game designers.

Seriously impressive