I’ve been thinking a lot recently, as I’m sure much of the Internet has, about the possibilities that will be in Scribblenauts. It presents an intriguing way of play: your imagination is your biggest obstacle. Thinking of strange ways to beat things will be where the real fun is.

That lead me to something else I have been thinking about a lot recently, as prompted by Angus’s recent article on game morality: creating artificial barriers to overcome.

I’ve seen it in countless other scenarios in games since I found myself staring into the 16-color abyss of a Netscape Navigator window in 1997: beat Final Fantasy with four white mages. Survive a Roguelike with only the items you can forage within the dungeon. Finish Ikaruga without firing a bullet (or, you know, finish it while playing two players simultaneously). Solo Onyxia. Beat Mirror’s Edge without using a gun. Don’t kill anyone in a Metal Gear Solid game. The list goes on, I’m sure.

I, on the other hand, never have the patience or skill to do any of these things; they require qualities (namely, hand-eye co-ordination and/or unemployment) I’m devoid of. However, I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty clever kid (my imagination is at least good enough to imagine that I’m an imaginative person) with a decent grasp on the English language (I know great nouns such as “dirge,” “colugo” and “arthrodesis”), and as such, I see Scribblenauts as a fantastic way to get creative with arbitrary rules.

I know it’s a bit early to start coming up with arbitrary “hard modes” for the game, but it’s been on my mind for a while. As such, I’d like to solicit ideas from my audience!

Here are some of my ideas so far, ranked in ascending order of assumed difficulty:

1. Played-Out Mode: Beat Scribblenauts without summoning zombies. ZOMBIES ARE PLAYED OUT.

2. Acrophobic Pacifist Mode: Beat Scribblenauts without use of height-assisting items or weapons (although, in true Pacifist style, tools which are also weapons can be used for their original tool-like purpose, so a chainsaw can be summoned but only to cut down a tree).

3. Fantasy Mode: Beat Scribblenauts summoning only items that only exist in the realm of fantasy. If a replica has been created of an item, it is okay, but use your discretion: a Bat’leth is okay because it is strictly from the realm of fiction, but a robot may not be, despite its birth in the realm of sci-fi.

4. Alphabet Aerobics Mode: Beat the first “level” (or stage, or starite, or whatever they end up being) using only items that start with A. Beat the next with B. The next with C. You know how the rest of the alphabet goes. Flip back to A, I guess, if there are more than 26, flip back to A, I guess. Have fun on level 24! (For the record, though, Phi-Life Cypher did the ABC thing better only a year later.)

5. Conversationist Mode: Beat Scribblenauts without destroying any of the environment. Summoning animate objects to do the destruction for you is also not permitted.

6. Breath of Life Mode: Beat Scribblenauts summoning only items that are alive upon their summoning. A tree is okay; a wood pole is not.

7. Midas Mode: Beat Scribblenauts summoning only gold-coloured items.

8. Intangible Mode: Beat Scribblenauts summoning only items whose noun is an “intangible.” While they typically become tangible once summoned in the game, words like “dream,” “temptation” or “theorem” are acceptable while “pillow,” “chocolate bar” or “right angle triangle” are not. Homonyms are a cheeky way to get around it, but are not allowed if the word you’re pretending is allowed isn’t a noun. So, no using stalk and saying “but the verb is intangible!”

9. Gadsby Mode: Beat Scribblenauts without using the letter E.

10. Summon Nothing Mode: Beat Scribblenauts summoning only items that rhyme with wolf. Remember that wolf does not rhyme with wolf. They’re the same word no matter what terrible rappers may try to trick you into believing.

11 (yes, THIS LIST GOES TO 11). 43 Mode: Beat Scribblenauts summoning only words that are a part of George W. Bush’s active vocabulary.

And for my second small post that simply links somewhere else, I’d also like to draw your attention to Text Adventure.

Tiff Chow and I are curating what will hopefully be a totally dope and expansive repository of great examples of text in videogames. From unforgettable splash screens to thoughtfully-placed speech bubbles (ooh, that reminds me… Comix Zone), anything where the text makes you sit up and say “I like the way that looks” will be up there, a couple entries at a time.

But, then again, chances are you’ve already seen this at Offworld. Or Destructoid. Or Infovore. Or Waxy. Or Tiff’s blog. Oder Nerdcore. Ou Graphism.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m late to the party on linking to someithng I had a part in making. Still trying to figure out if that’s sad or awesome. If you’re not already, follow us on Tumblr (or make a Tumblr so you can), and we’ll transport you to…

…sorry. Lame joke.

I’m not usually one to play the “link something interesting” game with my blog, but you owe it to yourself to read this. Angus of Tango Lima Delta Romeo has written a very thoughtful piece on the continuing evolution of “morality” as it’s presented in games (his definition of morality, in this case, is doing your best to achieve your goals within a game; so, as such, it is “moral” to kill goombas in Super Mario Bros).

Aside from criticizing the “invisible hand of God” that keeps a fully tabulated and annotated count of how many “good” points and “not so good” MoralityPoints™ you have, he raises interesting ideas as to how one might truly present moral quandaries to a player, and, therefore, add new depth to “playing” and “beating” a scenario.

But the most interesting parts of moral conflict, the ones that separate pulp and genre from literature, are the ones that are ambiguous and dependent on situation. I ran an Unknown Armies (a pen and paper role-playing game) game for some friends awhile ago where everyone played sort of idealized selves and put them through any number of horrible events that have no grounding in life. Players reactions were surprising. People acted out of panic, anger, fear, attachment, all of the things that many simplified moral codes urge us to deny.

Definitely worth a look, if this sort of thing is up your alley.

Over at Every Game Ever the original plan was to write a little piece about every NA-released SNES game in alphabetical order. For about two weeks, I slogged through te games starting with numbers, and the games starting with A. After a while, though, I lost steam, and it sunk into unfinished obscurity. Two years later, my friends Mekki and Brian berated me until I resurrected it, in a new capacity: many writers, each doing one article every week (well, that was the original plan. Some people are two months behind, INCLUDING BRIAN WHO MADE ME START IT AGAIN). The only rules are:

1) 150-450 words, roughly, unless it’s a special case;
2) At least one screenshot;
3) No number scores (6/10, 85%, etc).

It was a good idea, though. I brought it back and started recruiting friends to write for it. It started with myself, Scott, Angus, Brian, and Mekki. From there, it began to flourish. Monday through Friday, we’d bravely wade into the sports-game-infested waters of the SNES catalogue. I had (and still have) an ulterior motive, though: by forcing deadlines and topics, I got some of my most gifted writer friends motivated enough to actually write something. Looking at those previous blogs will show you how long it’s been since they even wrote something of their own accord.

And, despite my own shoddy writing on the site (my own official excuse is twofold: one, my focus is now on badgering people who are late to submit ASAP; and, secondively, I’m experimenting with copying other people’s writing styles or toying with my own on a weekly basis), it’s going fabulously. We’ve since doubled in authorship. Scotty joined the team, bolstering the ever-important “dick jokes” quota required for a modern website; Travis, too, was recruited for another quota: pretentious English Master’s student-style existential pontification. Adam found the site through my blog (I think) and expressed interest, so I hooked him up to help with the load. Alex showed interest, and contributed to the noise with his debut article on Chessmaster– in all-caps. Tiff Chow joined the team to round it out to a nice, even ten.

Since the site gets little traffic, aside from some very weird search engine results (my favorite at the moment is still last week’s “where can a condom get lost in vagina”), so I thought I’d highlight some of my favourite articles from the site over the past few months. I’ve included links that will allow you to read just that author’s works, as it’s a lot more enjoyable to read one author at a time and develop a sense of their style. These are in random order, except for the first two who I recommend above the rest of us (sorry, everyone, but Scott and Travis truly have this thing locked down — step up your game if you wann be at the top of the next roundup in a few months!).

TRAVIS makes you want to read from the get-go. From his review of the diabetes edutainment title, Captain Novolin: Captain Novolin is a brilliant metaphor for the struggle with obesity and diabetes, but also the simple yet unending fight against temptation that we all face as ultimately flawed human beings.

Also check out his Chrono Trigger review. It’s some of the best game-related writing I’ve seen on the Internet. It’s a crime he isn’t writing more about the games and the industry. But there is a difference between your standard unsophisticated video game story, upon which I now smirk from my ivory tower, and something like Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is a fantasy/sci-fi genre epic translated from Japanese, and it wasn’t written by professionals in either language, I’m fairly sure. This is, generally, not a recipe for the most delicious of successes. But it’s something special. It has a rather intricate narrative of time travel and the alteration of the future through your actions; it has characters that, to some extent, come alive. It has a nasty, big-boss villain who you can even convince to come to your side, if you do it right. It has multiple endings and a terrifying final boss that destroys worlds and waits for you at the terminus of every timeline, like a living, breathing dark god of entropy.

SCOTT manages to turn many of his pieces into hilarious little bits of short fiction. From his review of Andre Agassi Tennis: I’m glad these 16-bit graphics don’t allow the detail necessary to see the disappointment on the faces of my family as they sit in the audience and hold back tears of shame and disgust. How did this spastic even find his way to the tennis court? I knew there was something wrong with him…spends his whole day watching Mr. Belvedere re-runs and eating Sun Chips out of a dirty wooden bowl.

Or, check out his write-up of California Games II: I hoped that once the drug testing was done, I’d be banned from the California Games forever. Too many dark memories, scattered fragments riding a wave of victory that took me through the silver-lined gutters of stardom. Once you’ve won a California Game, the ultimate test is detoxing from the heady fallout of athletic recognition. Party people. Opiates fell like candy from the sky into my open mouth and I twitched slightly and pulled the hair of a supermodel. She screamed in outrage, but there were others waiting to take her place.

WILL (that’s me!) misses the simpler times. From Brett Hull Hockey 95:Originally I was going to talk about the weird 3/4 perspective in this game, and the even weirder old guy with greasy hair who POINTS at your coaching resource allocations with his HAND, in effect being a living cursor, but what’s the point? You don’t care about that. I don’t care either. I do, however, care about a bygone era where kids had artifacts other than the ones you see in poorly-encoded Youtube videos.

SCOTTY hates rudders, even though the word sounds sort of dirty. I hate flying games. Flying games are way too complicated and there’s usually no pay off. It’s like trying to sleep with girls that listen to NPR and check Pitchfork every 5 minutes. I just don’t have time to devote to something that won’t end in burgers or orgasms, or if I’m lucky, both, in any order I see fit.

MEKKI gets why Battletoads included two modes. From Battlemaniacs: The game is full of great times for two players. You can select between two modes. In one mode, you can hit your teammate. In the other mode, you can’t it each other. The first is great for trash talking. The second is great for actually making it anywhere in the game.

BRIAN managed to truncate every story ever quite succinctly, with Art of Fighting: (the) Art of Fighting’s plot is simple enough. Ryo’s sister gets kidnapped. Ryo and his friend Antonio Banderas go save her. Along the way you uppercut some dudes. The end.

ANGUS has been MIA for a while (finals tend to do that), but he’s coming back with a vengeance. From his recent article on Beavis and Butthead: It would be a beat-em-up if there was any sort of combat system. It would be a platformer if it had platforms. It would be a puzzle-platformer if it had any puzzles. It plays a little bit like A Boy and His Blob. Except the blob doesn’t do anything. And you can slap it. Repeatedly.

ALEX hasn’t been with us long, but his first review, of Chessmaster, is a lot of fun:
THIS AIN’T YOUR GRANDMA’S CHESS VIDEO GAME, FUCKERS! THIS IS ON SOME REAL, STREET-LEVEL SHIT. TOP OF THE LINE MOTHERFUCKING CHESS GRAPHICS! INSANE MOVES! WHITE KNUCKLE ACTION! THIS IS THE BAD BOYS 2 OF CHESS VIDEO GAMES FOR THE SUPER NINTENDO!

ADAM, as well, is new to the site. He has two reviews up (should be three later today!) and he was lucky enough to start with everyone’s archnemesis: the snackfood tie-in. But maybe I’ve been asking all the wrong questions. Would it sell a pack of Cheetos? Probably it would!
“Screw this, Cheetos are heaps better than this game. Wanna get some Cheetos?”
“HELL YES.”

Please check it out. While they can’t all be hits (I turn beet-red when I think about how bad some of my articles were. My Axelay acrostic poetry stands out as one of the most embarrassingly pathetic jokes I’ve ever commited to a computer), there are gems worth looking to as great pieces on games you (and, usually, the author) have no interest in.

And if you’re interested in writing, let me know. We may add a couple more in a month or so.

I didn’t expect to generate so many comments on my dam-bursting logorrheic last post. Really, I wrote it because it was floating around in my mind, and it was the closest thing to something bloggable that I’ve come up with in a month. As such, I thought I’d spit it out and people might get a little amusement.

Instead, I got a bunch of comments that challenge my position, and that really put my brain into overdrive. I think we fail to challenge people’s opinions far too often on this whole Internet vidyagame blogging sphere thing, and I truly appreciate the feedback. So much so, that I’m writing this response! It might be worth reading the first article before this one or else it may not make sense.

Matthew Gallant was the first to post, and he said:

Of course memory == binary, so that’s another direction you could take.

This is in reference to my use of the word “mems” to replace “videogames.” He’s right, and mems is close to memes, so… bines? I like bines.

From commenter mad, I got this response:

There is history here; see Chiptunes, 8-bit, 16-bit.

Naming it after the memory makes it feel static, like data. Naming it after the processor makes it dynamic, which is what games are typically all about.

Compare also to processes, executables, etc.

I see what you’re trying to do here; but, the only problem I see is that it assumes that a… a mem… (you know what? for the sake of the argument, I’m jsut going to call ithem mems for the rest of this entry) must be dynamic. Why didn’t they name “the film” after the projector? Because to name an artistic medium because of a characteristic you assign to it does a disservice to anything that wishes to use that medium to illustrate the opposite of that characteristic. What if a mem’s purpose was to communicate stasis, or stagnation? The only truly neutral way to name it is to simply name it for what it is on (ie. film, memory/binary)… not what takes it from that form and displays it (as a projector or processor would).

mad adds:

also note:
video games are about graphics
computer games are about numbers
most players don’t care about the other stuff :P

But, they don’t have to be. They can be about whatever the originator wants them to be about.

teh_red_baron says:

And then there’s ‘movies’, or ‘moving pictures’.
I think ‘videogames’ is fine. It’s inextricable. All it takes is exposure for people to respect the medium.
But I still like what you’ve attempted here.

The terms movies/moving pictures, while not perfectly accurate (after all, there are experimental films where the pictures does, in fact, never move), is restrictive but nowhere near as restrictive as forcing every piece of computer-assisted interactive entertainment/art to be a game. While exposure is key, so is changing some of the very language we use to describe the medium. After all, respected games are still games.

Eric J:

in the middle days of Infocom, they decided that the moniker “interactive fiction” was too clunky to go on, and announced a contest to have it renamed.
The contest ended without a winner, nobody was able to come up with anything decent.

I rather fancy the term interactive fiction. What else could explain it better? Plus, it shortens to IF, which is bloody brilliant for so many reasons.

Travis’s response will need to be broken up, I reckon, if I’m going to respond to it at all properly:

The problem goes beyond nomenclature. The medium of which we speak is largely composed of, yes, games. It is to games that we look when we want to make some kind of critical artistic analysis.

It is indeed largely composed of games, but it doesn’t need to be. I agree: the nomenclature isn’t the only issue, but, it is one that needs to be assessed.

Can a game be art? Is chess an art? What about Puerto Rico? Is good game design an art form - establishing balanced choices and keeping players entertained and stimulated throughout? What about playing a game - is there art in being a mindboggling Street Fighter expert? Does that mean polevaulters and gymnasts are artists too?
There is a philosophical distinction between “design” and “art,” one that only became pronounced after classical times. Building a beautiful chair that is like a minimalistic sculpture is surely art, but building a GOOD chair became delineated from that. Some would suggest that the gap between them is narrowing again.

This skirts the original question, which is, why must the medium only be games? There is interactive scuptural art which is certainly not called a “game”– immediately to mind springs an exhibit where a robot was sweeping a floor. When people approached it, it would sweep more feverishly. By the end of the night (accidentally, I might add), it had managed to etch a design in the buffed concrete underneath it. That’s not the point, though; while the generative art it created is interesting, the point was the interactive structural piece. Why does all computer software need to be a “game,” then? That robot wasn’t a game. Whether the creation of a game is art or not is meaningless — the question is, why must we call any attempt at art within the medium a “game”?

Beyond that, should “video games” remain in the arena of gaming, or should there be attempts to move beyond entertainment to a more artistic realm? As you say, most art is not “fun” in the same sense of the rest of its medium. I have fun reading a good entertaining story, but when I read Joyce or Faulkner it’s not “fun.” It’s satisfying, it’s engaging, it’s fulfilling, it’s mind-broadening, but not fun.

I think that, as a medium, there’s absolutely no reason that it shouldn’t be explored in pursuit of experiences other than fun. I can’t justify that; it’s an opinion. I don’t think humanity would be where it is now had film or literature simply stayed in the realm of fun, though.

But how else can people be motivated to engage in something so interactive? How else can their interest be gained, especially in terms of a medium so deeply embedded in our minds as a game? The video game is so closely tied to the engine of industry, and so young, that I don’t foresee it breaking away from being fun - usually mindless, shallow fun - for profit. Of course, film and books and music are massively profit-based as well. There exists still a strong current of “art” film and “literature,” at least, which is driven by artistic needs and desires rather than entertainment = money.

There exists a similar current within gamemaking. It’s a lot smaller, and much more stunted, but in time, it will be a force, given the current trajectory.

I really don’t foresee the imminent success of a game that isn’t “fun” to play, but on the other hand we are seeing some now - the one where you play a grandmother walking through a cemetery, and all you do is walk and wait to potentially die, for example. Probably not “successful” but it has been published and received news stories from various major websites.

Exactly. It moves away from gameness, but is still called a game. Wherefore?

mad again:

Games of poker, chess, football, war, the heart…. with money, pride, life or love on the line, all games contain anticipation, drama, conflict, hope, tragedy, catharsis. There’s always a context, a history; there are colorful characters, their developments and revelations. To win or lose is simple and pure; but it provides a reason, and a meaning to everything that surrounds it.
Games aren’t supposed to be fun because they are fun, but because that’s what can sell to people who just want to have… fun! Trying to distance oneself from games not because of what they are but how they’re sold is kind of meh…
..‘Game’ is the perfect word though. My argument is that the only reason it seems like an improper term is because the markets, media and even academia, have co-opted the term to suite their needs. To rebel against the word ‘game’ because of how they use it, is to implicitly buy into their worldview.

The question isn’t, though, what defines a game: the question is, why must “game” define so much? It’s as much a misnomer as when someone calls commissioned urban aerosol art (yeah, I just called it that) “graffiti.” It misses the point. Furthermore, I’m not sure the word game is being misused. Sure, there are dozens of entries in the dictionary for “game,” but to me, it means something that’s meant to challenge in a way that can be defeated. Art can’t be defeated; it does challenge, but that’s a different definition of the word “challenge.” You can interpret a piece of art; you cannot master a piece of art, though. I want this medium to have the opportunity to be interpreted without being mastered.

Ben Abraham writes:

I think that “video game” (or videogame if, like me, you prefer) comes close to describing what they’re usually “put on”, since they’re usually on some sort of video screen.
I also think that the conventions around memory say that something is stored “in memory” rather than on memory derails your argument a bit.
What’s wrong with ‘Computer Games’? That *is* what they are played/put on, after all - some kind of computer. In fact, ‘computer games’ used to be my defacto term for video games before I picked up that convention.

Whether it’s in or on, memory is the place it is put to be worked on, distributed, and consumed. But, the point is twofold– not only is “video” outdated, but “games” is as well, in my opinion.

And, finally, Tellurian writes:

There’s the constantly ongoing bitchfight between consoleros and PCgamers wether you’re talking computer- OR videogames, since one term supposedly doesn’t fit the other’s contents.
Going in the “Movie” direction, the term “Interactive” could be coined there, since that IS the common element of these.
“Yesterday I watched a movie and played some online interactives.”
Yeah still sounds a bit like a 70s sci-fi version of today.

Interactives is indeed another possibility. Originally I was going to try to work with that term. But, at some point, I decided that I couldn’t derive a punchy, one-syllable name from it. Certainly nothing that could invade the public arena like “games” already has. As far as computer vs. video goes– do people actually argue about this? I call it whichever comes to my mind first, generally.

The point is, basically, that I have a problem with calling the entire form “games” when the medium has potential to be more than games. Calling it games means that people are not only less likely to make non-”games” due to the name, but people are also less likely to accept those non-”games” for not being fun, even if they have something else to offer.

I’ve seen the argument online, I’ve had it in person, and it repeats in my dreams: the term videogames (or video games, whatever) needs to be replaced. Games are supposed to be fun, but the interactive computer-assisted medium can’t be an art form if it HAS to be fun. Last autumn I saw an original Kiki Smith piece, and I didn’t have fun. Once I read King Lear. It wasn’t fun (despite what the mainstream media says, I, the video game player, did not derive pleasure from such things as an old man having his eyes gouged out), but I liked it. Watching Loves of a Blonde wasn’t fun, either. But it was worth it.

I had a conversation with Matthew Gallant recently about the term “video games” and how it’s useless and paints the entire medium into a corner. I mean, clearly the video part needs to go. There are entirely auditory games. I heard about an XNA one recently where you have to sue your speakers to evade a monster of some sort. He brought up “interactive art” or “interactive entertainment” but who’d say something like that? I think at a certain point we decided that, since it’s software, and it’s art, why not software art?

The thing about software art is that it works insofar that you might refer to filmmaking as “the cinematic art.” Or, you know, when you’re in school and you have to study “language arts.” That’s not what we need, though. We need a good, solid noun.

So, I decided to do a little research: where did other media get their everyday names from?

BOOK: From Old English bōc { Proto-Germanic *boks, probably related to *bōk- (“beech”) (perhaps originally used to make writing-tablets). Cognate with Dutch boek, German Buch, Swedish bok. Compare beech. — Wiktionary

Right, so the book is probably named after that which they were originally put on. That makes sense, right?

MUSIC: Now, hold up a minute. Music isn’t the product that you have. You have singles, or albums, or MP3s or whatever, right? Let’s look at album, here. From Latin album (“blank white writing tablet”) { albus (“white”). That’s Wiktionary again. So, it seems like the musical album was informed by the more traditional book-like album, which is a word for what it’s on. Again. I am seeing a trend here.

FILM: A film is on film. I never call it a movie anyway. It sounds like a kid’s word. Besides, film supports my argument.

Books, albums, and film are references to what they’re on. What’s a “videogame” or “video game” or “piece of interactive entertainment/art” or “software art” on? Well, probably a number of things, potentially. A punchcard. A USB key. A GD-ROM. A hard drive. A website.

Thing is, it’s always on memory.

So what if we called them “mems?” It’s short, catchy, doesn’t pigeonhole itself by explaining only one facet of itself, and refers to the one thing it needs to exist: the memory upon which it is imprinted.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think this is going to happen. I just needed to put a cease fire on the war going on between my blog and the massive writer’s block in my head. I banged this out in… well, by the time I finish this paragraph, 20 minutes. I needed to make sure my blog still works. Or I can still press buttons on a keyboard. Or something.

So, yeah. MEMS. It’s the new slang. Someone tell Michael Abbott, Ian Bogost, N’Gai Croal, and Geoff Keighley to start saying it– they’ve got the blog, academic, enthusiast media and mainstream media pretty much locked down. Those four are like the Voltron of changing our lexicon. I implore you, gents: MEMS.

Brickbreaker is an Breakout clone for the Blackberry. It ships for free on all phones, I think. It came with my Blackberry Pearl. I can’t imagine there’s any reason for it to be there, other than the fact that it proves to you that your game can run games (and, therefore, you should buy games).

It could’ve used a few more QA runs. Its physics are dodgy. I assume you know a thing or two about Breakout clones, if you’re reading this; if not, try this for about 30 seconds and i’m sure you’ll know what I mean. You get a paddle, and a ball, and a bunch of bricks that the ball breaks, and you have to break them all. It’s Pong Vs. A Wall. It’s ubiquitous.

There are good Breakout clones out there, to be sure: the DS title “Nervous Brickdown” played around with the formula a lot, to pretty good results. Arkanoid is an arcade classic. I’ve not played Arkanoid for the DS, let alone with the custom paddle controller, but I bet it’s fantastic. Brickbreaker on the Blackberry is mediocre when compared to the vast multitude of clones out there. Its entire existence is designed to waste a bit of time here and there and make you consider buying more games on your phone.

And yet, I play it — hardcore.

I can think of few other games with a more broken physics set. Balls will bounce at weird angles and go through walls and the paddle will completely miss balls it shouldn’t miss at times. The controls aren’t exactly good, either: the trackball on a Blackberry Pearl isn’t exactly the most high-quality device (more on that later). Maybe, though, it’s that it’s on my phone, and I don’t look like a total dork staring at it on the metro, but I end up playing it a lot. Far more than my DS, anyway. I have a couple other games for my Pearl, though. A friend of mine worked for a place where he could get me a few for free, but nothing touches Brickbreaker as far as play goes. It’s so lightweight that it boots immediately and requires virtually no battery, and you can pause it at any time.

What I love about Brickbreaker is… I can’t believe I’m saying this… the depth. I am absolutely convinced that a lot of the depth is accidental (to be fair, I am convinced a vast majority of quality in games is accidental, over the history of video games), but it’s there nonetheless. The powerups are as bland as cornmeal, but open the game to interesting permutations. Multi makes many balls, but they shoot in four upward directions from the main ball the second you get it. This means waiting a split second might mean the difference between uselessness and quick finishing. Gun allows you to blow up any brick in one shot, even the “unbreakable ones.” This means you can break some levels by popping holes into boxes with only one rather inaccessible hole in them. One powerup flips your controls, offering no bonus other than the usual 50 points coming with a powerup– making it poison to a new player, and free points to a veteran.

The longer you play, the faster the ball moves until you lose a life. If you aren’t directing every shot with precision (as much as the nonsensical physics will afford, at least), the puzzle starts dropping towards you, applying even more pressure. There are levels I am convinced are unbeatable if you let it drop all of the way, so it often makes sense to drop a life that these points like some sort of ablative armor. Throw a steak to the hungry wolves outside to spare your life-meat.

Once you beat the 34th level, you loop back to the first stage. It took me months to realize this, because some of the levels leading up are so brutally difficult to the learning player. Once you loop back to 1, though, you think “boy, I can just play infinitely!” However, the puzzles start dropping from shot ONE in this playthrough.

My high score when I started writing this was 28000 points. Since, it became 32780. I made it to level 31 of the second playthough. Sadly, I’ll probably never beat this score, because Pearl’s trackball has a pretty poor lifetime. Mine sticks intermittently, now, and I lose dozens of lives because it decides to crap out mid-move.

Recently, I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress. If you’re not familiar, it’s a wildly inaccessible and “hardcore” game, in alpha stage for the PC. You take control of seven dwarves, who are dropped somewhere on a very detailed, randomly-generated planet, and must fend for themselves with the meager supplies with which they start. Oh, and the graphics are ASCII– so, really, they look more like floating hpapy faces than they do like dwarves.

The thing is, this game is intense. The game’s unofficial catchphrase is “losing is fun!” There’s no mouse input, so it relies entirely on a cryptic keyboard input system. It’s geared to kick your ass over and over, and appeals to the most hardcore of roguelike-loving, masochistic super-simulation geeks.

And yet, I play it. Casually.

It may not make sense, but allow me to paint a picture for you of my typical playthough. It starts with generating a world, a massive processor-buster that takes ten minutes and procedurally generates a geography, a thousand years of culture, and the constantly shifting borders of good and evil. Once done, you can begin a new game, and set up your seven dwarves with skills, items, and a location. Picking a location is important. You want water, at the very least; however, you also want a mountain to dig into from the start (you don’t have to, but it makes things a bit easier on you). You want nice types of stone, to sell or make into things, and you want to avoid aquifers, which make your structures leak. Unless you play hardcore, anyway. Which I do not.

Once you’ve picked a location and setup, your little dudes hit the great wild and need to make a home. Here’s where I get casual about it: I turn it into a game of The Sims. I make little bedrooms for my dudes, make sure they have food, make them do jobs (like making doors out of stone and chairs out of wood), make their living space good… and, by the time the first year is over, and they have a nice little place, I start losing interest. I don’t particularly care about fighting badguys or trade routes or traps or weapons. To paraphrase something I’m sure I’ve already paraphrased this year, in this blog, I just want four walls and limestone slabs for my dwarves.

But, really, this is yet another reason the “hardcore/casual” indicators are sloppy, particularly for games. There are many “hardcore” games that are, for lack of a better term, played in a “casual” manner. I picked up Halo 3, a holy grail of hardcoredom, and played a match here or there online and appreciated it. I thought it was fun to be able to jump really high. I hardly touched it after the first few weeks. I might pick it up again if some friends decide to have a round, but I require little more. I play a bit of Rock Band when drunk, but only on medium, and I don’t really care about challenge so much as I do pushing buttons and making lights blink. Starcraft? I dig the colors, but you lose me once you talk about build trees or click speeds. I like to pick up Street Fighter every once in a while, but I still don’t know what a link or chain or focus or cancel are. I just like tossing hadokens. My Dwarf Fortress games are just that: the equivalent of doing a few hadokens, enjoying myself, and turning it off.

It’s not to say I’m simply a casual gamer, however. There are casual games I play in a hardcore manner. I’ll tell you a bit more about that in my next post called “Casual, played Hardcore: My Experience With Brickbreaker.” Yeah, Brickbreaker. As in, the free mobile game that ships on Blackberries.

I’m probably not the only one, but I am ready to throw up. The current generation box-art is computer-assisted, committee-designed, samey samey samey crap. The only exception is the oft-referenced Japanese box for Ico, but other than that, even the “good” stuff isn’t inspiring. It seems that there’s some set of invisible rules, where everything needs to use orange and/or blue in huge quantities, and you need to have an iconic dude on the cover OR a fake-minimalist image (see Skate. cover) and it’s always gotta have either this really on-its-way-out stark coloring or this really photoshoppy blendy brothers Hildebrandt look. It’s excruciatingly boring.

I’ve been looking at 2600 games recently, and there’s a real magic to the package design back then. Maybe it’s because there weren’t unwritten, unbreakable rules set by advertising “gurus” and stiff-collared CEOs. Maybe it’s because the games’ art was intended to describe, not complement, the in-game assets. There was a certain amount of imagination that needed to be had; not simply InDesign wizardry and wads of cash and an “artists’ liaison.” Here are some of my favourites, and current points of comparision (click for full-sized images):

Take, for example, the covers of these two games: Burnout Paradise and Enduro. Now, don’t get me wrong: Burnout Paradise has one of the most attractive covers in recent memory. It takes some risks: a (relatively) huge amount of whitespace, a rather cartoony drawing of a car, an off-angle shot of a city in the distance. But, in my opinion, that’s where the awesome ends. In the cartoony drawing of a car, you’ve got a screenshot of the gameplay. You’ve got the same blurry, zoomy coloring method that you see on virtually any other console. The box doesn’t tell me what the game’s about in any way; it’s just a piece of (in this case, better than average) corporate art meant to entice. I think it only entices accidentally.

Against it, look at Enduro. This is a fantastic drawing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Burnout Paradise cover took at least a little bit of inspiration from it. The name alone evokes thoughts of, well, endurance. It doesn’t necessarily tell the viewer that it’s about driving. The image, however, looks at an image of the game (see the four “tracks”), and translates it into a beautiful, fantastic image of a folding journey through night and day. It escapes the box that attempts to contain it, even, and continues right into the bleed.

To the left, R-Type Dimensions. It’s not a real box cover, no. It’s also not a new game. However, it falls into all fo the irritating trappings: trading-card shading, mascot worship, no real concept of what’s happening in the game, overuse of orange and blue… it comes off as perhaps mildly related to Halo 3, I suppose, which might stimulate sales, but it doesn’t inspire the imagination.

To the right, Rescue Terra I. Perhaps it’s not a sterling representation of excellence, but I appreciate its use of color and perspective. The game’s title isn’t just crossed thoughtlessly across the top of the image; it adds to the dynamic of the forward-lurching image of the spaceship battling what was probably once an evil alien. Again, it’s maybe not the best, but it’s exciting compared to what’s put on covers these days.

Okay, these two have a tenous link: rabbits. But, still: this is about boring vs. exciting cover design. First, Ubisoft’s Rabbids; blueish background, some orangey-yellow mascots, same old shading, no real relevance to gameplay. Just some art loosely based on the game. It implies mischief, I suppose, but not enough to inspire me to buy it for my hypothetical child. Second is Wabbit, which looks like something I really would buy for that child: a dreamlike, pastoral fairy tale of an image that proudly displays a main character who’s some girl who lives on a farm. Content aside, cconsider the design: Avant garde ITC font used somewhere other than a Rock Band game, with angles within the design that compliment such a dramatic font. It’s weird that the company’s name is so much bigger than the game’s name, but I still dig it. A myriad of colors not always seen on covers. Creepy, surreal perspective. I’ve never heard of Wabbit, but I want to play it– or, at the very least, watch a kid play it (not in a creepy way, don’t bother making the joke).

I know I railed on orange and blue, but LOOK AT THE SHADING ON THAT DUDE. He looks like he’s made of a blob of sentient mercury. Again, the realer-than-real-in-a-Surrealist-way thing is going on here, and Ram It rocks it. Peggle’s box is one of the most boring, uninspired, lazy bits of box art I’ve seen in ages. I suppose I shouldn’t expect more considering the art IN the game. At least the ball is the “mascot” and not that stupid unicorn. The latter dude, though? He looks insane. I love it. Based on box art alone, the second I would play sooner than the first.

That is, if I were interested in breaking gems. Which i’m not right now.

Mass Effect: Blue. Orange. Some people. Space-ness. “Sci-fi” font. Game name at top. This looks like everything ever. EVER. Earth Dies Screaming isn’t much better but let’s tlak about HOW AWESOME THAT FONT IS. It’s called “Shatter,” it’s an ITC font, and it looks insane. It’s my favourite font of the moment– I even put it in my new site banner. The picture’s got wicked grids and crazy perspective and all that, but the name? Wow. That’s important. Mass Effect doesn’t mean anything. It’s like the name and the box were afterthoughts. “I dunno, make it look… spacey. Make it sound… spacey?” The Earth Dies Screaming, though… that’s a name that makes you think someone over at 20th Century Fox found someone on the street and gave him a nickel to name their game. Luckily, he was already yelling “THE EARTH DIES! SCREAMING!!!” as they asked him, so he didn’t even have to think about it or hear that it’s a sci-fi game. Apparently there’s a movie of the same name from the olden days. Who cares, though? That game looks awesome. Mass Effect? If I didn’t know I wanted the game already, I would’ve skipped it based on the box art alone.

Here are two games for kids with “adorable” main characters. The former has the excruciating committee-built feel all over it. I mean, really? Why not just “Boom Blocks?” Or, even better, why not any other name in the universe? Something like “I Want My Mommy.” OH WAIT THAT’S TAKEN. By the GREAT looking game on the right. Huge, unhappy teddy bear takes up the whole image, as if it were some sort of insane portrait, ONLY OF A TEDDY BEAR. HE’S CRYING. But seriously, look at the design. The rainbow? The off-center, off-angle title in a very attractive san-serif font against the black background. It commands your attention; Boom Blox’s cheesy title demands it. Boom Blox’s characters are an embarrassment to an amazing game. Mommy’s teddy bear, if anything, makes the game look better than it inevitably is.

Look, I get that the other game is weird. But, the thing is, the design is spot on. I’d go so far as to say it’s Swiss-inspired (aside from the image, which creates an interesting juxtaposition between adorable and streamlined). The former is from the Videogame School Of Boring Case Design. With Capital Letters. Seriously.

Mid-budget current-gen games are the worst for it. You know that they do it to look like the big guys, but they can’t quite do is AS well. They also don’t want to put too much thought into it for fear of not selling like the also-rans they want to be (note: the also-rans that their investors and marketing teams want them to be: obviously the design and programmers and such would love it to be the best it could be). Here’s a poem to describe this cover: I see orange, I see blue, I see mascot, hey, eff you. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But the latter is boring too! It has lots of orange and blue too!” Well, you know what else it has? It has the cover of Independence Day. A DECADE BEFORE INDEPENDENCE DAY HAD IT. It also uses the orange and blue differently; not to create “Coooool” blending effects, but to create stark contrast. It has the kinds of sci-fi art I can get behind– takes itself seriously, but has a flying saucer. It also has a Futura stencil font, which is awesome on anything. Also, what’s it shooting? A crazy wall? Probably something that is represented in-game because it has the extra duty of EXPLAINING THE GAME (there’s probably… a blue wall, or something). Whatever, I like looking at it. I HATE looking at the other one.

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So, what’s my point? My point is, the homogeneity in designs these days is excruciating. I didn’t pick these 360 titles just to prove a point: I just picked a few RANDOM 2600 covers, and tried to pick games that were somehow tangentially related to them in modern releases. I am REALLY not trying to “game” your opinion. I am just showing you some observations. And, yeah, a lot of these old games looked like each other. But, they don’t look like anything now– so using their design motifs, however retro, will make you stand out. Actually, no. It wouldn’t even be “retro” if you did it right. They use timeless, Swiss-inspired (I said it… AGAIN!) design rules. And those parts, at least, will stand the test of time.

The first of five forthcoming reviews: Crayon Physics Deluxe

I’m gonig to be writing reviews for Mirror’s Edge, Fallout 3, Operation Darkness another mystery game in the future. I had been close to finishing them, but stupidly, didn’t save the notepad, and my computer crashed. This has actually happened more than once; my home computer has some sort of internal hemorrhaging which prevents it from staying on an unblue screen, and my work computer occasionally loses power because the wiring in Montreal’s Old Port is uniformly miserable. This is about the fourth time I’ve written this, and the other reviews were written at least twice, as well. But, this time, I think I finished it! And saved! Now all I have to do is put it into Wordpress, huzzah!

CRAYON PHYSICS DELUXE

http://www.crayonphysics.com/ — Get it for $20 on the website.

ADD: Crayon Physics Deluxe doesn’t have a too-long, boring tutorial. It ramps up in an engaging way. You always have something new to do, and none of the levels are too boring or same-y. It looks pretty. There’s nothing to criticize in this category; you can sit down, start playing, enjoy yourself, stop whenever, and pick it right back up again. 5/5

OCD: When I bought the game, it was maybe a 2 or a 3 in this category. While the game flowed very nicely and the difficulty ramped up well, there was a certain point where it started to look irritatingly difficult and it was easier to use two fall-back tactics (gameplay spoiler alert: pulleys with silly giant boulders attached, or blocks stuck underneath the ball that raise it artificially, can solve nearly any problem in the least graceful way imaginable). However, the later addition of a second star per level for “cool,” “old school” and whatever the other one is (graceful or something) solutions forced you to go bak ot levels where you might have been lazy, and resolve them for maximum reward. It’s a surprisingly complex game, assuming all of these levels actually can be solved in such a way. 4/5

Escapism: You wouldn’t think this is a game that would incite a high escapism rating, but it turns out to be an incredibly engrossing game, indeed. Some of my most favourite music of the past few years is included in here, a sort of Boards Of Canada-infused dreamfugue with notes of the overworld music from Rome: Total War. This combination pleases me. The simple graphics are not drab and annoying, as I was worried they’d be; they are perfect. They willingly take a backseat, at once clear and subtle, allowing the game’s central mechanic to breathe. Indeed, it’s only when you think about them that the graphics really become a focal point, and when you do, you’re rewarded with washed-out, fuzzy nostalgia for your developmental days. And, unlike the current “nostalgia” trend in games, this one doesn’t cash in on Saturday morning cartoons and NES. It speaks to something for universal: the joy in drawing and creating and imagining those drawings to life. 4/5

Histrionics: The indie game zeitgeist certainly means a lot of people will be talking about this game, particularly due to its interesting presentation and method of gameplay. With Scribblenauts on the way, and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, there’s high interest in games where you get to create your own stuff. However, when it comes to this game, there’s only so much you can say: something this simple, both in front of and behind the scenes, means that there won’t be a lot of staying power. It’s also not exactly the first game to do what it does; those two games whose names I forget were pretty similar (one is a flash title and one was a four-letter free PC download). Still, 4/5

VERDICT: Pick it up. It’s something you can play when you’re tired, or you’re not playing something else. It’s a frontrunner for one of the best games of 2009. It’s relaxing, and addicting, and easy to pick up, and difficult to conquer, and intriguing to even watch others play. There is little higher praise than those things combined. 3/3

The score: 81%. This game represents the top quintile, and, in the opinion of the reviewer, is deemed “an excellent experience, and a lovely way to spend a lazy evening.”