The Armchair Game Designer

I’m not dead! Things have been extremely busy on the non-game-design front lately. I’d give you the details, but then I’d have to stab you with blades hidden inside both of my wrists. Which brings me to today’s review, one of the most recent games to enter the prestigious List of 100. Having played and severely disliked Assassin’s Creed 1 (more so than the average player, by the looks of things), imagine my surprise when I found that this latest entry actually kinda sorta rocks.

Read More >>

So I’ve decided to do something that’s probably incredibly irresponsible and will make me never want to play video games again, but here it is:

Next Saturday, witness in horror as I participate in a great fundraising effort in a 24-hour straight gaming marathon in support of the Texas Children’s Cancer Center!

But more importantly, I NEED YOUR HELP! Help me reach my pledge goal by visitinghttp://bit.ly/ryan-game-marathon and DONATING to this great cause!

Even if you pledge just one dollar per hour, your support will go towards funding pediatric cancer research and treatment!

Come Saturday, I’ll post a live stream for everyone to see me do for a good cause what I would’ve probably done for free.

Remember, that donation link again is http://bit.ly/ryan-game-marathon Please help!

I decided to take another look at the List of 100 Games and quickly realized the gross overlaps that occur within that list… either in terms of games that have been re-released under different bundles, or annual incarnations of what amounts to the same damn game (I’m looking at you, EA Sports!) With that said, I’ve decided that it’s necessary to drop the following games from the list:

• MGS3: Subsistence (35) (Duplicate)
• GTA3 (29) and Vice City (14) (San Andreas being a refined and honed version of both games’ gameplay)
• Street Fighter IV (34) (Practically impossible to play effectively without a special control, and thus violating the Guitar Hero Rule)
• Burnout 3: Takedown (32, PS2 version) (Duplicate)
• Ninja Gaiden (57) (Duplicate with its re-release)
• Madden NFL 2003 (83) (Incremental)
• Madden NFL 2002 (75) (Incremental)
• World Soccer Winning Eleven 7 (49) (Incremental)
• Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (30) (Incremental)

…and add the following game (so far):

• Batman: Arkham Asylum

Since I don’t exactly feel like completely rewriting the game chart until perhaps right at the very end, I’m abandoning the “descending order by score” method and just slotting games into the newly-opened spaces. I’ll continue to keep the 100th game as the lowest-scoring, however, to maintain a benchmark above which other games will have to reach. I have no doubt that the next two quarters will produce releases which will eclipse some of the lower entries on the list.

After a small hiatus, I now have a considerable backlog of 100 Game Challenge entries to post, so stay tuned! First up on the chopping block is Oblivion, a game notable not only for being an expansive open-world RPG but also for woefully underusing the voice talents of Patrick Stewart. Join me after the jump for the analysis proper!

Read More >>

It’s a classic formula for hilarity: take an out-of-touch corporate entity and watch as it tries to clumsily appeal to younger generations. Take the original Don’t Copy That Floppy video from, in which two ne’er-do-well kids get a lesson on piracy from the “Digital Protector”. It was lame then, and certainly hasn’t aged well, which of course means it has become an Internet classic. Go watch it now if you haven’t seen it already.

Back? Crazy, right? Who knew AOL made video games…

Anyway, yesterday the gods of Internet humour saw fit to bless us with an overstuffed sequel to “Don’t Copy That Floppy” by the Software & Information Industry Association. Take a look:

After the break, I’ll take you through a magical second-by-second journey through this triumph of corporate ineptitude.

Read More >>

Hello website, did you miss me? I sure missed you. It’s about time to break out the old Internet cliché and apologize for not posting. It’s been an incredibly busy month full of moves and work, but at long last, I’ll be settled into a new place and ready to go.

A few developments on the gaming front. Big news first: yesterday I bought a PS3 Slim. Lowering the price / form factor is one of the smartest moves Sony has made. Having never owned a Sony system before, I’m living proof that these cuts are effective at drawing in new customers.

I am quite disappointed that Sony purportedly has ‘no plans’ to reintroduce backwards compatibility with the PS2. I understand why they did it, but it will make much of the 100 Game Challenge more difficult for me, and might necessitate a small investment in a used PS2. The only other thing to disappoint me so far was Sony’s decision not to include component HD cables (like Microsoft did with the 360). I bought an HDMI cable in order to hook it up at home, but for the next few days I’ll be forced to play it in standard definition on a TV from the HDMI-less “HD-Ready” days of yore.

Read More >>

Welcome to “Things That Need To Die”, in which I thoroughly ream the gaming industry for its perennial laziness.

Super Mario Underwater Levels

Super Mario games – the core games, that is, not the endless array of tangential spin-offs – are almost always consistently fun (though nobody can really blame Miyamoto and company for the oddity that was SMB2.) There is one notable exception to this consistent track record however: Mario’s foray into the world of deep-sea diving, in his much-maligned underwater levels.

Ironically, while the rest of Mario’s core mechanics have innovated and progressed over the years, the underwater gameplay mechanic has actually regressed and gotten worse. The few underwater levels in the original Super Mario Bros. were a decent change of pace from the usual running and jumping, and didn’t radically alter the control mechanics.

Read More >>

Here it is: the highest-rated game on my list, and the second-highest rated game of all time after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, according to Gamerankings.com. Does the world’s favorite plumber truly live up to the hype? Or are these reviewers full of the very thing that ordinary plumbers would find themselves up to their ankles in, were they to actually descend strange green pipes?

Read More >>

Today I take a 4-night trip to Boston, and coupled with an upcoming research paper for my moral issues summer course, I doubt I’ll have a lot of time to blog in the coming days. But I couldn’t go without mentioning some very big local news: Ubisoft, one of the smaller ‘big guns’ of game development and publishing, is opening a massive Toronto studio.

Ubisoft, whose Montreal studio already employs about 1700 people and is responsible for a lot of triple-A titles, plans on hiring about 800 people for its new studio over the next decade. This move marks an important milestone in the Ontario government’s plans to increase high-tech jobs in the province, investing $263 million into the developer over 10 years. In an interview with Gamasutra, Ubisoft Montreal/Toronto CEO Yannis Mallat had this to say on the plan for Toronto:

We don’t want to shoot low; it’s important for the quality of jobs and the quality of the studio to aim as high as we can as a group.

So we want to make triple-A games. It doesn’t exclude the possibility we might make other kinds of games, but we’d want them to be the best and the most successful.

What’s interesting is that Mallat talks a bit about the convergence of the film and video game industry. I’ll be writing a separate post when I return on the benefits and pitfalls of closely associating the two mediums, but it sounds like Ubisoft is really sticking with a cinematically story-driven presentation:

Toronto’s a really interesting city for that because it hosts, for example, the biggest film festival in the world, larger than Cannes. That kind of thing is certainly going to help us gather talent and get a closer relationship to the film industry, because we need to get closer.

We need to learn from them and the things that they do, and when we talk to directors and they see our tools and work they are always surprised about how much closer our industries are than they thought. Making the most of that convergence is important to us and it’s going to create better jobs and ultimately better games.

Mallat ends the interview by praising a number of nearby universities and colleges, and the “brain gain” of hiring both graduates and coaxing former Torontonians back to the city (or the province).

Have I mentioned how exciting it is to live in this country, in this time? Canada- and Ontario in particular- have been aggressively pushing for an increased presence in the worldwide high-tech business. Canada has the third-highest concentration of game developers behind the United States and Japan, impressive when you consider our relative population differences. Yet traditionally, the biggest studios have found homes in other provinces. Quebec has had Ubisoft’s flagship studio for over a decade, Alberta has BioWare, and Vancouver has studios for big names like Rockstar.

Read More >>

This video (also below the break, probably NSFW) has been making the rounds as of late on the Internet, supposedly showing a World of Warcraft player having a monumental freak-out over the fact that his mom cancelled his account. Whether or not this particular video is real (I have some doubts), I believe that this kind of reaction is absolutely possible from a hardcore W0W-player. I’m not here to argue about Blizzard’s moral integrity in creating an army of Azerothian slaves. No, I’m going to be a bit more favourable toward a game that stole so much of my own time as well, and see what sorts of things Blizzard did right in order to create an experience as addictive as WoW.

First, I want to talk about a guy named Abraham Maslow. Abe was a psychologist, and like most psychologists, he wanted to know what made people tick. But while people like Freud were busy studying crazy people and getting their names dropped at parties, Maslow decided to study “exemplary” people like Albert Einstein. His studies yielded him quite a bit of recognition when he published his so-called “hierarchy of needs” theory. The theory outlines the various things that are important to people, most notably suggesting that people’s needs form a pyramid-like ‘hierarchy’. Once the lower and more basic needs are met, the theory goes, individuals are willing and able to achieve the higher levels of needs.

Read More >>