Taste the Rainbow

Darkened Skye has, in my experience, the most prevalent in-game product placement of any game. It takes the real world item of Skittles and puts them into the game as the most important piece of the game.
Most games that use in-game product placement will make it a part of the background or a prop; Darkened Skye uses Skittles for many aspects of the game. In the beginning your health is shown by an orange circle with a white ‘s’. After completion of the first level you gain another circle, this time a red one, and speak with an old lady who calls them Skittles. They originally show your health, but later become your goal for each level and they are used in combination with the other colors to form magic spells. There are continuous references to the rainbow and magic, both synonymous with the Skittles image. The plot of the game is very simple: Skye, the main character, must go and get the rainbow back from the evil Necroth who has stolen the rainbow so he can keep all the Skittles to himself.
What does a game with this level of in-game product placement mean? Honestly, I can see this being both good and bad for this game in particular, and videogames in general. My main complaint is that the gamer is not informed they are paying for the lovechild of all the Skittles commercials from the 90’s. The box has no reference to Skittles anywhere and so you do not realize what you are buying. Obviously, there are games that let users down and cause them to regret buying the game, but Darkened Skye is nothing but deceptiveness. One site said that Skittles had commissioned the game, but I have not seen a lot of information from other sites confirming that. Would the sales of the game been drastically reduced had they been honest about the presence of Skittles? I definitely believe so; on pure principle people do not want to pay for an advertisement.
I mentioned that the addition of Skittles could possibly be a positive aspect for this game. This is purely because it is one of the only things that add to the game. This game is very weak on many levels and does not compete with many other games. The Skittles gives it some form of identity and uniqueness. The game continually pokes fun at itself and many other normal gaming conventions; it attempts to be funny and is occasionally successful. The game play is pretty rough and I read gets worse the farther you get into the game. My main point is that the Skittles may be the only interesting point that would cause one to even remember the game’s name. In conclusion, the game frustrated me and left me annoyed. I read many reviews that some people found the surprise addition of Skittles very amusing and an important part of their enjoyment in the game. If the game had been a good game, that felt completely finished and fun to play, maybe I would have felt the same. Since it did not have that feel to it, it came across as a feeble attempt to make a new kind of advertising and failed. If they decided to do this, they should have been done much better.

Games from Class

http://rodvik.com/rodgames/marriage.html
http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/
http://www.thepoppenkast.com/data/JW/thehangover.zip

Play before you read too much about these, they are meant to be experienced.

Also, here's Facade: http://jayisgames.com/archives/2006/12/facade.php

PS - this was on the wrong blog for a while. I have too many things in Blogger!

Botched PC Game Launches

Game launches are pretty much a happening event, especially when that game is one of the most anticipated ones out there. The more the anticipation, the more the expectations from the game. And in case of PC games, there are those free "micro-installments" we so lovingly call patches. Then, there are those publisher pressure and deadline requirements that many games are released, well unfinished. A prime example could be SiN, released in 1998 and expected to stand its own against the critically acclaimed Half-Life and to be released during the Christmas holiday season, was let out with bugs and resulted in SiN not achieving as much success as the developers had hoped. In short, I would think a lot more could go wrong at PC game launch than a console game. And 1up.com has documented the top five of those messed up launches.

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3166996

An Anecdote of Social Dynamics In-Game

As an on and off player of World of Warcraft, City of Heroes/Villains or any other MMORPGs, it has always been challenging for me to blend in easily into the game as I would do in an online first person shooter. To my credit I have played most of the good MMORPGs and RPGs out there, but I just cannot hang on to it long enough to build a completely loaded character on level 60 or something. That said, I have some friends who just swear by them and like playing MMORPGs (Guildwars in this case) over anything else and they do it for more than five hours every day! There are those small elements that attract me to play these games and unfortunately, many that drive me away from it after I start indulging into these.

Starting with the good bits, what fascinates me is the choice and options you get to create your character. I would say out of all the MMORPGs out there, World of Warcraft employs the most number of character customization. The game has nine character classes that a player can choose from, though not all classes are available for each race. Each class has a set of unique abilities (general skills and spells available to the entire class) and talents (allow players to build their character and further refine their role). Every class has a set of three talent trees, with which players may choose to build their character's talent trees for damage-dealing, healing, etc. Characters can also equip different weapons and armor, either to customize their character or to improve abilities, as and when they acquire it. In addition to all this, it will let you change the head gear, skin color, hair style, facial hair, etc. Now this seemingly results into an enormous number of customized player characters. The sense of uniqueness in my character is what makes this part interesting and makes me give this a shot. The character is ready and unfortunately that’s the end of good times for me!

I think, game balance and design is one of the most difficult tasks when it comes to MMORPGs. Open ended gameplay, un-anticipated human behavior, huge number of player, weapons, levels combinations lead to a lot of un-expected situations. And to make the gameplay smooth and playable on most computers, you cannot expect eye-candy of the highest order from these games. But that’s a personal opinion, or else you won’t have millions of gamers playing this game every now and then.

Almost every game starts with a message stating that game play experience may change when you play this game online. WOW doesn’t have any difficulty level to choose from. Thinking it will be difficult to play against computer by default, I decided that playing against other humans on a PvP server (the interaction within the game in a PvP server occurs between other human players) would help me grasp faster as there would be other humans on the same level as me. But this theory backfired real bad and real quickly! My level one paladin stood no chance against the bunch of rogues I ran into. Every time I went back to my body (after they killed me) they used to lurk around, waiting for me. And me being a grade A World of Warcraft noob, did not realize it for the first eight times they killed me! I don’t know how level 52 rogues can stoop to such low levels by assaulting a level one paladin time and again. I later found out that this distasteful practice was described as "corpse camping" in Wikipedia.

"Corpse camping is where after killing another player, that player then continues to camp at the enemy's corpse (either by using stealth or other means) and kills them when the player resurrects themselves. Although this is frustrating to the camped player, this is not considered griefing by Blizzard and is not subject to punishment by Game Masters."

That said, I quit that server and hopped onto a PvE server. I get to create my player character once again from scratch. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I cannot take the same character that I had created in the PvP server to the PvE server, not for free at least. Paid transfer was an option, but my character was not worth it!

Player vs. Environment, commonly referred to as PvE by most online games and gamers, is the player-controlled character competing against the game world and its computer-controlled denizens, as opposed to Player vs. Player. A player must complete a pre-defined task without fighting other players. To my surprise, Blizzard usually calls them "normal" servers. Since it would seem that, a PvP server would be a normal server in an MMORPG. For a casual player like me, who just wants to play the game and train with less interruption, then PvE may just be the place for you. Some players like the thrill and risk of random player vs. player combat, and would consider PvE realms to have a difficulty that is too low. But in its defense, in a PvE server corpse camping, ganking, and griefing tend to be less prevalent.

Ganking and griefing have several meanings. When an overwhelmingly large or more powerful group or party kills you and/or your group or when a single player attacks a player of equal or lesser level who is in the middle of a fight with something else and is handicapped by that fight, its ganking. Griefing is the term used to describe the act of one player hassling another player. This can be as simple as someone trying to obscure someone else's view with their own character, or as bad as pulling mobs onto someone, or even preventing someone from achieving their goals like killing quest-givers or other NPCs.

But then I ran into a different kind of problem in the PvE server. I was only able to interact with players who were near about the same lever as I was i.e. level one! Other experienced players who were on much higher levels than me, would not either have the time and patience to speak to me, or maybe I did not initiate the conversation in the right manner. In any case it leads me to ponder about in-game social dynamics. I was later helped by a level six player who got me up to level three by directing me what to do and which quests were to be take. Should there be etiquette for in-game conversations too? In my opinion there should be, but I don’t see any courses educating you in schools for that in near future.

GMI evaluates SL

In an extensive 2007 survey of several hundred SL users, conducted by Global Market InSite, not only evaluated the market potential for real-life brands and product advertisements, but also studied negative and positive social attributes as reported by the SL residents.

https://www.gmi-mr.com/gmipoll/release.php?p=20070423

Interestingly, some negative consequences were evident, but significantly paled in comparison to the positive.

http://simchronicity.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/second-lifes-potential-for-virtual-consumer-marketing/

Having recently researched the "Warcraft Widow" groups (http://kotaku.com/gaming/world-of-warcraft/warcraft-widows-an-internet-support-group-222201.php), I found it quite interesting that SL does not impose time commitments which are so present in other 'game structured' online worlds. One does not have to cut off real-life, to improve their online characters.

Virtual theft, is it?

Now, this is something new. I was going through the law website and there was an "old" article (dated Dec 21, 2007) about a game publisher made to pay-up for the loss of virtual property of a gamer in China! A Chinese court has ordered MMO publisher Shanda Interactive Entertainment to pay the equivalent of $680 USD to a player in its MMO World Of Legend for the loss of virtual items. The gamer plans to return to court to sue Shanda for the roughly $20,000 USD he has spent on the game over the previous five years.

http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/12/chinese-gamer-s.html
http://www.pacificepoch.com/newsstories/113050_0_5_0_M/

Everybody Has to Start Somewhere

I was looking at some recent examples of how the people and developers in the indy game industry have managed to become "legitimate" or at least more successful than the typical indy game developer both here and abroad.

Darwinia- Developed by the creators of the critically acclaimed yet small release Uplink, Darwinia was Intoversion Software's second game which pretty much sold way better than anybody could have anticipated. They are also the group that developed Defcon.
http://www.introversion.co.uk/

N+ - Developed by a two man team, N was a platformer based around tricky acrobatic game mechanics in which the player had to make their way through a death filled level to reach the exit. What was a free game and also updated and released on PC as N+, but still as a free game, is now available on Xbox Live and has DS and PSP versions coming out soon.
http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/

Cave Story - Many of you probably have heard of the awesome action-platformer created by one Japanese man over the course of five years. A fan translation was made for an English version and it's popularity has garnered it a PSP release, although it has been some time since I last heard new information regarding the PSP version.
English version - http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=cavestory

Touhou Project - From Doujin group Team Shanghai Alice, the Touhou Project is in fact a series of bullet-hell shooter (and a couple fighting games) known for its characters and its creation by one man team ZUN. Although as far as I know none of the Touhou games have a "legitimate" release, the series has way more popularity than the average Doujin game.
http://www16.big.or.jp/~zun/html/game.html

Melty Blood - As mentioned in class, Melty Blood started as a doujin game by group French Bread with the help of Type Moon which was based off of Type Moon's game Lunar Legend Tsukihime which itself started as a small release and turned into a bigger game and anime series. Melty Blood, after several different versions were released, eventually received a PS2 release of Melty Blood: Act Cadenza and is a popular 2d fighter in Japan.
http://www.e56.info/mbacps2/index.html