Girl and I did finish The Endless Setlist on Medium (the lowest setting).  I took us another hour and a half on Sunday morning to do the final 18 songs, for a grand total of just over 5 hours.   I’ve got a lot to say about RB, RB2, and GH in general, but I’ve been slaving away at my budget, and that takes my writing priority.

For now, check out GamePolitics’s shaving of a video of the Today Show anchors playing Rock Band 2 (on easy).

My favorite part is where most of them refuse to quit playing, even though their time is up.

I’m sitting here totally awestruck by Spore.  And I want to tell you all about it.

First, no there’s no Sporn here.  Second, I don’t even have the Creature Creator yet, so I don’t have some non-obscene thing to say.  I’ve got very little to say about tools I haven’t used or anything (although I’ve watched you youtube vids of people making things.)  I don’t want to talk about the DRM in Spore, either, except that I’m probably going to suck it up and buy it when things come out.

No, today I saw something technically awesome.  Something that made me look at the glorious obviousness of it, and know that I was in the presence of greatness.  Something so simple that no one had thought of it before.  I haven’t even read about this, but maybe I haven’t been sucking on the Spore Hype teat long enough.  But I still saw it today, and I’m stunned.  In a word, sporestruck.

Crystaltips, aka Alice of Wonderland blog, did some searching for her own name on Sporepedia. And someoen had made a creature with that name.  That was cool, and I was having trouble viewing it, so I went to the Sporepedia myself to see what was up.  I hadn’t been there yet.

I went, and was met with this absolutely wonderful amzing tip:

How do you see one of these Creatures in your Spore Creature Creator? Right Click on the thumbnail image of the creature. Save the image to your desktop. Drag the saved image from your desktop into the Spore Creature Creator. Voila! The Creature is in your game.

Okay, so I did that. What did it download? A .png file.  Not some bizarre .xml file.  Not a .spore (.spr?) file. No, just .png.  An image, just like it says.  Something I could put on my website.  Something I could print out, or set to my desktop.  Just that, an image.

Yet, I can drag that image into the creature createer and the creature is in my game. “Voila!” Indeed.

My first reaction was that they were using steganography to accomplish this.  That would be stupendously cool. Steganography is the study/practice of storing secret information inside of images. If you think of a computer graphic as an array of bytes, where each byte (or more) has color information for each pixel in the graphic, then you have more bits than you need to store graphical information (especially on a lower quality image, stored in a higher quality format).   You can then use these higher-order bits to store extra information in some pre-agreed upon code.  That would mean the image would be all that’s required to pass on the full info of the creature.

However, on reflection, I think they are using the filename as a key index to look things up in the Sporepedia.  That’s still pretty impressive, and allows for me sharing things, so long as I don’t change the name of the file.  I want to experiment some with it, as there’s a potential for exploitation with a filenaming convention.  The advantage here, is that Spore, and EA get to control what’s really available.  So, if I make a penis monster, and they don’t want to store it, then it’s gone from the shared universe.  And that’s why the steganography idea is so much cooler.

I’ll probably mess with this Wednesday night, and update how it’s working.

I don’t remember where I read it. In one of several (or perhaps in several of several) novel writing books that I’ve read over the past year. There’s lots of advice out there, but one of the oft repeated bits is that you have to make the hero’s quest personal. Several games do this, but most don’t even bother. It’s important, though, in getting the player to care about what is happening.

People by nature and by culture, deeply understand other people. They get what it means to fall in love, to lose that love, to have people near them die or be threatened by death. They don’t understand what it means for the whole city, country, world, or universe to die. That’s a bit beyond most of us. I know it’s beyond me, I just can’t grok that kind of calamity. I know when I was in high school in the 80’s we were in imminent danger of nuclear attack and it informed my day to day life, living in fear. But what mattered to me was whether the captain of the cheerleading squad would go out with me or not (I was a geek, she laughed at me, of course).

Personal tragedy trumps big dire thing every time. When 9/11 happened, I’d been going through personal tragedies much worse. My father had died six months prior, but only three weeks before those planes ran into those buildings, my wife had left me and my grandmother died — all in the space of three or four days. The worst thing that happened to me on 9/11/2001? My wife called me to try to make up with me in the wake of the tragedy.

I still can’t wrap my head around what happened that day, I couldn’t emotionally process it then, and it just sort of wafted over and around me. I went to lunch and came back to find out they’d evacuated the uptown part of Charlotte. I called SexyWife (before she was officially the wife part), and we went home. She says I was an emotional basket case (my words) that whole time, I’m sure I have a journal entry for it somewhere on Sarah, but not up and running, but that’s not my point

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She’s a Hispanic resistance fighter-photographer with green lips, and star of a cult hit (if poorly selling) video game “Beyond Good and Evil”, and she’s back. All hail Jade!

Destructoid has the roundup of Ubisoft’s announcements, which include a great deal about Far Cry 2 (an FPS), the announcement of a new Prince of Persia game for Christmas, as well as the announcement of Beyond Good and Evil 2.  Jade is one of my favorite characters (possibly my favorite female player-controlled character).  She’s witty, strong and passionate;  that and she has a mysterious past that’s not completely explained in the first game.  I mean, while it does wrap up the major story line, BG&E ends with Jade rocketing off into space, after who knows what, trying to find out what the larger story is, and if her parents are alive (and how they are certainly involved.)

I’ve played it through twice now, which is a rarity.  One of the few other console games I feel similarly to is Prince of Persia:Sands of Time (which is a stronger, more innovative game than BG&E).  The new PoP, according to Kotaku, is not going to be in the trilogy started with Sands, and it looks strikingly different.  It’s interesting to see that they say they are going to include “stuff that worked in Assassin’s Creed” as part of the game.  I’m not sure whether to be happy or cautious about that, since AC was supposed to be a spiritual successor to Sands, and I’m not sure it succeeded.

Still, fairly interesting and exciting news from Ubisoft, enough to distract me from 4e, anyway.  Oh… and for those interested in trying out Sands, or the original Beyond Good and Evil, both are available for PC on GameTapкомпютри втора употреба. 

So, with much regretfulness, the Wii was returned to my home over the weekend.

It is interesting to me the way that Girl feels about the two games (and for now, we’ll treat them as two separate games): Okami for PS2 and Okami for Wii. She was going to keep the Wii until the end of the month — which should have been enough time to finish the game. She wants to play the PS2 version, so she’s not spoiled on the game, but I doubt she’ll ever play the Wii version again. I’ll let her say how she feels about the game in comments, if she wants.

As I said earlier, I’ve tried some of the pieces of the game, and there’s no doubt that some of the recognition isn’t working correctly. I can draw a line, it looks like a line, but it isn’t interpreted as a line. I always had problems with the wind and bloom powers, in both versions. It seems worse in the current version. I just got the fire power, which is context sensitive (it only works if you start on fire, and end on something that can be melted/burned — and you know this as you draw the line.)

I’m going to continue playing it, in order to assess it for myself. My current thesis is still the same: it’s not about making the motions, it’s about how the game recognizes them. My thought is that the recognition should be joyful and fun, if it works. I haven’t played enough Okami to determine if the is joyful and fun.

However, the main reason that I am glad I got the Wii is alluded into the title of this post: downloadable games. This week marked the begining of WiiWare, which is Nintendo’s version of XBLA. It’s misssing demos, which means I’ll almost certainly buy less games. (I download most of the XBLA games that seem remotely interesting, and have purchased things I had no idea were going to be as fun as they are.) So I’ll be going more heavily on reviews to make my Wii purchases.

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Well, it was only a “long” weekend because I took Friday off. And while I don’t have personal days yet, it was totally worth it.

CSCC, the school Girl graduated from, was having the Downtown Digital Arts Festival, which I found out via Brenda Brathwaite’s blog. Brenda is on the IGDA board and has worked in games for years. I first became aware of her via the IGDA Sex SIG, where she posted and ran things while working on Playboy : the Mansion, and her book Sex in Video Games. I was excited, because I’d been reading her words for several years, and pow! she’s coming to Columbus. It’s not everyday that you meet someone with their own Wikipedia entry.

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(I know I said I’d do a Round Table post today, but I realized I mis-read the topic, and need to start anew)

Bear with me as I work on writing a game design document. I’ve done plenty of design documents in my life, but never for a game. I’ve written a few computer games, but nothing substantial. It’s an interest, and something I want to work on. Also, a certain kind of game is the goal of this blog. So I need some practice. Feel free to leave suggestions, tips and other info on any of these posts — it will be very much appreciated.

The game is generally described here, and all the posts about it can be found under the sex butler category.

The overall tone of this game is lighthearted, which fits the casual-game origins of the design. Because of who I am, it’d be nice if it promoted safer sex and sex education (without being heavy handed about it), and was generally open to various genders and attractions, while letting the player guide that in the way that he or she is comfortable. I also don’t want this to be just a diner-dash style game, and want to mix in some tycoon-style sensibility to it. That is, it’s not just a click-fest, but between levels (or as part of an ongoing gameplay), there are business decisions about what sorts of rooms, open areas, products and advertising the player can offer.

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This weekend, we shifted a bit: we only did a little Rock Band, and without the full group, but still fun. Unfortunately, our Rock Band guitar’s strum bar is sticky, and has to be pushed down very hard to register — this makes fast notes nearly impossible, although up-strumming still works fine.  This is enough of a barrier that we quit playing for the night.  We’re going to look at it — but does anybody know how the warranty info for these works out? I remember seeing something about returning instruments directly to Harmonix, instead of the retailer.

Anyway, SexyWife got Juiced 2 from GameTap, and I was seriously underwhelmed by all but the Barbie aspects of the game, some of which seemed stupid.  Why do I care what my driver looks like? It was almost as complicated as Oblivion, and I didn’t know why (and then couldn’t find similar controls for the cars).  SexyWife pimped her car out, but I was having trouble getting excited by driving small economy cars around an annoying track.

We had real trouble with the drifting tutorial so I suggested we get a used copy of one of the Burnout games.  Not Paradise, whose open world is more of a hindrance than a help, but Takedown — which is a compatible XBox game — and Revenge which is for the 360, and thus has crackachievements.  I loved these games on the PS2, but we haven’t turned on our PS2 since we got tired of Persona 3, and bought the 360.

In a fit of “I want to play something different,”  (before we went to GameStop), I played Psychonauts again.  It just makes me lust for Brutal Legend, but it’s amazing to me how well it holds up on the 360.  Most of the games I have left over from my XBox days either don’t play (SSX Tricky *sniff*) , don’t play right (Munch’s Odyssey *sniffle*), or look crappy (pretty much everything else). 

Pyschonauts’ consistent art style still manages to look decent on the newer machine.  I don’t have an HD, of course, so I can’t compare there.  But this game clearly understand that naturalistic looks and hyper-realism limits a game.  If you’re a game of the week, that’s no big deal, but Psychonauts is worth playing through more than once (this is my third or fourth go at it).

The Wii is still at Girl’s house, happily looping Okami animations.  We did the quizzes over the weekend, and negotiated when the Wii would return to its One True Home.  Satisfied I could play Okami to my heart’s content in a month, I restarted No More Heroes in Mild mode.  Evidently “Mild” is harder than “Sweet.” I evidently missed this on the first play through, so this one is a bit more challenging, so perhaps I’ll finish it this time.

Going back to the lack-of-playing-the-PS2, I see a lot of people talking about the change in palette in Okami.  We can’t tell.  Maybe we’ve got crappy TVs or bad memory, but it looks basically the same to us.  Of course, we haven’t looked at the PS2 version is a really long time, and I’m not turning it on just to do ‘Picture 1′ or ‘Picture 2′.  The game is still fun, although Girl half-complains that it’s easier.  I think it’s just less annoying.  But then we know which one of us is the Zelda Fanatic here. *cough*cough* (not me)

When I picked up Burnout (deciding to buy both Takedown and Revenge), GameStop was having a buy 2 get 1 sale.  We looked at a bunch of stuff, and I wound up buying Enchanted Arms, because with the sale and my discount it was cheap enough to justify, even if it wasn’t great.  And it’s not great, but with movie-based budget considerations, I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it.

So far I’ve

1. Been asleep on the special day (In class, the day of the festival)
2. Accidentally awakened the Great Evil™
3. Escaped my home town (which was a whole city) after it was destroyed by the Great Evil™
4. Then I was thrown in jail as part of cutscenes that let me to the next city.
5. That’s ok, because I escaped into the sewer
6. Aided by rebels, of course.  Who are led by a noble lady.

Lots of cliche’s here, but they all have a slightly different spin than I’ve seen before.  The lisping gay guy who was all over my (now apparently dead or kidnapped) best friend meant I’d never take this very seriously.  Also involved in that was the main character’s voice, whose tone and intonation is almost exactly like Galstaff, Sorceror of Light.  (and always have to mention this: Mordenkainen’s Faithful Hound is not a first level spell)

Anyhow, I never got around to playing Burnout but the wife has, and she’s enjoying it.  Which is cool, ’cause now I want to play.  And so I’m gonna go do that now, if it please ya (or if it don’t)

Or, something to write about while the rest of the games blogosphere gets GTA IV crazy.  So some thoughts about what I’ve been doing (and what I plan to do for the first few weeks of GTA IV mania).  Of course, if the mania lasts more than 3 weeks or so, then I’ll start thinking about playing GTA IV — at that point, it’s not just another forgettable game. 

Maybe it’s sacrilege to think that GTA IV is going to be like that.  But look at what metacritic is saying – oh, sure it’s got a 99 metacritic. But the player ranking is 8.3.  Because of the way the enthusiast press (IGN, GameSpot, Game Informer, etc) get excited about games like this one, I think they have a tendency to overrate these games.  I don’t think it’s even collusion on the part of Take 2 or RockStar — I think their marketing knows how to generate this fanboy frothing at the mouth reaction we see.   It’s not that I don’t think it couldn’t be a good game — I just don’t want to be drawn into the hype machine.  Let’s judget the game in a few weeks or a month to see if it’s any good.  I did the same with Assassin’s Creed ( no this post isn’t about that game:)

(And as support, this link came in while I was writing this, about the problems with exclusive reviews.)

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 I don’t care, and this image is largely why.  Or at least indicitave of the reason.

For those who don’t know, this image was one of the first released for the game GTA IV.  If I recall correctly, it was (in a cropped form) on the cover of Game Informer magazine several months ago.  I’m not enthused with Game Informer — it comes with my GameStop discount card — and this is an example of why I feel that way.

Now, I’ve made it clear that sexuality isn’t exactly verboten here at CotT, as our goal here is to make mature games.  But we do mean mature by that, at to us that implies a bit of class.  This image reminds me of the bad sort of porn that comes out of the traditional porn industry, none of which we find very compelling here. 

Of course, half my reaction is that this game is Grand Theft Auto IV, not “Hooker Porn IV”, where the advertisement might make more sense, although then it wouldn’t be on the cover of Game Informer magazine.  I seem trashier/more explicit images most days, and sometimes I’m interested and sometimes I’m not.  But this doesn’t make me want to play the game.

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