When Manifesto Games was just getting started, I suggested to its owner, Greg Costikyan, that he should try to tap into the vast doujin games market, and localize doujin games like Hitogata Happa and Akatsuki BK and the Toho games. Unfortunately, Manifesto Games’ Japanese representative was unwilling to brave Comiket or something and simply told them “it can’t be done”.

Fortunately for all good westerners, a company that is willing to brave Comiket to talk to reclusive doujin game developers and localize their wonderful games has arrived, and sure enough one of their first two projects is Gundemonium Collection, which includes Gundemonium, Gundeadligne, and Hitogata Happa!! The collection will be released as a download in August, for only $20.

Hooray!

Thanks to StriderHLC for the news!

So, then! It’s five months late (and, coincidentally, after GDC and after all of the free trial XBLCG memberships expired and everyone had to buy new memberships), but Microsoft has finally released sales data to the creators of XBox Live Community Games. Until this last Saturday, none of us had any idea at all of how well our games were selling, or how much money they were making. The first sign of trouble came when Microsoft enthusiastically announced that the top selling community games have made more money in these 4 months than the average American makes in a year. That number is $30,000 which sounds impressive, until you compare it to something like iPhone game sales; Trism, for example, made $250,000 in 2 months. (Of course, it’s important to note that the iPhone doesn’t have anything on par with XBLA competing with its more independent applications.) When the sales numbers were finally released on Saturday, the first thread on the subject to appear on the official XNA forums was entitled “I got my sales numbers and want to cry thread“.

I got my sales numbers and, fortunately, do not want to cry. In the Pit did OK. Not great, but not terrible. Despite being the #1 most popular community game for a couple of weeks, and the 12th most popular of all XBLA games at one point, I understood that that popularity was due more to novelty than love, so the low sales (at only a 1.5% conversion rate) weren’t much of a surprise.

What was an unpleasant surprise, however, were the sales of Weapon of Choice. Weapon of Choice was one of the winners of Microsoft’s 2008 Dream, Build, Play game development competition, and was created mostly-singlehandedly by Nathan Fouts, who had previously worked as a professional game developer on many of the Ratchet & Clank games before striking out on his own and seeing if he could “live the dream” of working entirely for himself. Weapon of Choice was the first product of that venture, and after Fouts presented an early build of the game to Microsoft as a potential XBLA game, they encouraged him to rework it as a community game instead, to give a good, veteran-developer shot in the arm to the upcoming service. Since then, Weapon of Choice has been the “poster boy” for community games, with interviews on MTV.com and Destructoid. I also liked it lots.

Fouts is the first of those developers who “made more from their game than the average American makes in a year” to post his opinions on the subject, and since it took him over a year to make the game, and he has to pay royalties to writers and musicians, that number is pretty disappointing. Novaleaf Software, who spent $100,000 developing Biology Battle, are preparing their own statement, and I don’t expect it to be very happy.

Meanwhile, the real winners of XBox Live Community Games are Rumble Massage and Fireplace and TV Calibration, non-game “apps” that have been mainstays of the Top 10 sales list, and clearly took significantly less time, money, and effort to develop. Now that we’ve finally received sales data, and based on the responses from a wide variety of developers, I feel certain that there will never be another community game as high-quality as Weapon of Choice or Biology Battle or Carneyvale Showtime. Knowing that a $100,000 game can only hope to make $30,000, developers will lean toward short, shallow, simple, cheap games and non-game apps that can be developed quickly with little to no overhead.

Despite all of this, however, I think that XBox Live Community Games is a success. It was designed to be a way for hobbyist developers to create and distribute console games, and in that aspect it has succeeded admirably. The XNA team has even been surprisingly good about listening to the community and implementing changes they request (including making the Community Games section of the XBox Dashboard easier to find, doubling the trial time limit from 4 minutes to 8 minutes, and, in an update coming this summer, adding support for avatars and update notifications to community games). Microsoft never promised community game developers that they’d make millions (although it was fun to hope for millions). In fact, it’s actually better for community games that the sales figures were as low as they were; $30,000 is still plenty of incentive for hobbyist developers, but if that number had been closer to $100,000 then we’d suddenly start seeing community games by Namco, and Sega, and Capcom, because it would become a platform for making 20% as much as an XBLA game for 0% of the rigmarole and strict approval process of an XBLA game, and the kinds of smaller, hobbyist developers that community games was designed for would get buried under professional games. It’s sad that this means there’s not really a place for games like Weapon of Choice and Biology Battle and Carneyvale Showtime that are more professional than community games but not quite on par with XBLA games (WiiWare, maybe?), but this turn of events does secure community games as the place for hobbyist developers that it was designed to be.

So… the Superplexus is an amazing 3D maze toy, where you navigate a ball bearing along a plastic track by turning the whole toy in every axis of rotation. It was designed by an art professor named Michael McGinnis, and is a project that he worked on in fits and starts from childhood through adulthood, until he developed the final model, and sold the design to Hasbro. Hasbro added a completely superfluous electronic timer and annoying-music player to it, and proceeded to run the idea into the ground by marketing it to small children who were much too young, clumsy, and videogame-oriented to appreciate it. Right around the time that Hasbro discontinued production of the Superplexus, the kinds of adults who are the proper market for such a thing discovered it, and were overjoyed to find that they were available on clearance for $5 at Toys R Us. Once they snatched them all up, however, they were gone forever.

Earlier this month, ThinkGeek added the 360 Puzzle Sphere to their catalog, which is identical to the Superplexus, minus the extraneous, tacked-on electronics, and with a less elegant seam between the two clear plastic domes of its case. After a few emails from various potential customers (including me) asking if this model had the designer’s approval, ThinkGeek did a little digging, came to the realization that it is a Chinese knockoff, and have stopped selling it. Meanwhile, in the comments of this BoingBoing post about it, someone quotes the designer as saying that he only made 33 cents on each Superplexus sold by Hasbro, but didn’t mind because he was more interested in getting it into peoples’ hands than he was in getting rich off of it.

So, the dilemma is this: knowing that this knock-off exists (it is sold elsewhere as the “Magicel Internect Ball” (sic)), and knowing that the designer was getting peanuts from the “real” version and wasn’t doing it for the money anyway, should you buy one, knowing as you do so that you’re supporting a manufacturer who is ripping-off an artist’s life’s work?

There’s a TV show in Japan called “Game Center CX”, in which a comedian named Shinya Arino plays old 8-bit video games while providing a humorous running commentary. Last year a tie-in game called “Game Center CX: Arino’s Challenge” was released for the DS, and unlike the thrown-together drivel that tie-in games usually are, it was absolutely brilliant. The premise of the game is that Arino has somehow become an evil wizard, and he sends you back into your own mid-1980s childhood, and forces you to hang out with himself as a child and play video games. The game’s main screen shows a little room with tatami mats on the floor, a bookshelf in the corner, and you and young Arino plopped in front of the TV playing 8-bit games. There are 8 games in all (well, 7 games and a marketing-tie-in remake), which range from shooters to sidescrollers to racers to an RPG, each of which is an original game that feels like an homage to NES games (but with better controls and other modern improvements), and each of which could easily stand on its own as a 200 point WiiWare or XBLA game.

You’re free to play any game you’ve unlocked as much as you want, but there’s a “meta-game” here; the evil wizard Arino challenges you to perform four specific tasks in each game, like getting to a certain level, or finding a hidden power-up. Once you’ve performed each game’s four tasks, you unlock the next game. The tricky part is that it’s often unclear exactly how to perform a task, and in these situations you have three resources at your disposal. First, you can talk to young Arino, although he primarily just offers encouragement (and exuberant commentary while you’re playing games, like shouting “SUGOII!!” when you get a 1-up, which really never gets old). Second, you can look in the game’s instruction book; each game includes an instruction book, which looks exactly like those “letterboxed” instruction books that came with NES games. And third, you can turn to your bookshelf of game magazines, which not only offer hints and even cheat codes, but also feature interviews with fictitious game designers, and previews of upcoming games.

I played this game earlier this year and enjoyed it immensely, and now I’m happy to see that it’s finally getting a US release in January under the title Retro Game Challenge. I look forward to playing it all over again with English translations of all of the game magazine articles, and I hope that the instruction manuals are filled with authentic NES-era Engrish. So, be sure to check it out when it comes out! It’s just like being 10-years-old again, playing video games in a dark room while all the other kids are outside in the sun, only without your mom shouting at you to go get some exercise. Ahh, youth…

The full-length version of In the Pit is now available via Xbox Live Community Games.

I am very happy about this.

If you have an XBox 360, and either headphones or surround sound, it would mean a lot to me if you at least played the free trial.

UPDATE: Due to some really bad design decisions on NXE, it looks like most people don’t know that XBox Live Community Games even exists. Here is a handy video showing a few different ways to get to the full list of community games. Note that, on the first method, pressing A gets to the community games “featured content” that only lists a couple of games, and pressing X is what actually gets you to the full community games list.

So, uh, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, hasn’t it? I guess this would be a good time to mention that, although I still have my day job, I think I now finally count as “a real game developer”, because the awesome people at Novint Technologies contracted me to create a full-length version of In the Pit and adapt it to work with their Falcon haptics controller, which I did, and now they have the finished game and are deciding if they want to tweak it any more beyond what I did for them before they publish it. So, yay! In the meantime I also ported my full-length version of In the Pit to the XBox 360, just in time to submit it to the Dream, Build, Play competition, so hopefully that will also get it some attention, although I’m not holding my breath on it winning, since it’s up against 284 other entries (up from 69 entries last year!).

I’ve also gotten into pinball machines a bit; I fixed up a Mars: God of War machine over the summer, and flipped a Big Brave, I’m picking up a Firepower over Thanksgiving, and I’m also working on a custom pinball machine. Pinball is an interesting hobby, and is a lot more different from video games than I thought it would be; most of the enthusiasts are retirees, so everything tends to be quite a bit more lackadaisical. Pinball is also “mostly dead”, with only one company still making machines, so although there is some froth about “the next new game” (which, by the way, is a pinball adaptation of the TV show 24 for some reason), the vast majority of discussion and interest is about old machines, stretching all the way back to the 1940s. I’ll write more about pinball later. In the meantime, if you’re interested, I photo-journalled the whole process of fixing up that Mars: God of War machine here, with lots of notes full of basic information about pinball and things that I learned while I worked on it.

Oh, also, I got an XBox 360, primarily so I could test In the Pit and make sure it worked on it — which it does — and now I’m getting caught up on 360 games. It’s kind of surprising to set a ridiculous goal for myself like “I’ll buy a 360 when I have a game completely developed for it and I have to buy one so I can test it” and then actually achieve that goal.

So, that’s my summer in a game-specific nutshell! More of the usual rantings, musings, observations, and odd news to follow! (Actually, hopefully less of the rantings, since I’m making an effort to be less cynical.)

It’s very interesting to me to see how the “console wars” have played out. For 30 years the console wars have been all about companies fighting tooth and nail for the same tiny (although affluent) demographic, trumping each other back and forth in an escalating battle of processor speeds, licenses, and number-of-buttons-per-controller. The PS2, the Dreamcast, the Gamecube, and the XBox were more or less the exact same thing, playing (in many cases) the exact same games, aimed at the exact same demographic, just made by different companies, and the company with the best combination of money to throw at advertising and licensing and repartee with established game developers (Sony) won that round. Now, however, the three major systems are aimed at three significantly different demographics, and there might just be room in the industry for ALL of them to thrive.

The XBox 360 is for traditional video games; extensions of the kinds of games that have always appealed to the core video game demographic (read 5- to 30-year-old males, although that age keeps skewing higher as that core demographic grows up and gets older).

The Wii is for casual and super-accessible games designed to appeal to new and non-traditional players. The other day I was standing in the video game section of Walmart next to a group of four middle-aged women, while we all waited for the person with the keys to give us the controllers we wanted; I was getting a 360 controller, and they were getting a copy of Wii-Play. I pointed out to them that they could get a Wiimote without the game for cheaper if they wanted, but they said “oh no, we want this one! It comes with pool!”

The PS3, despite a terrible launch that branded it as “just like the XBox 360, but designed by pretentious idiots”, has evolved into the console for software that is artwork first and a game second. Games like Flow, Pixeljunk Eden, Everyday Shooter, and Little Big Planet started the ball rolling on this trend, but Linger in Shadows — a demoscene demo that can be fiddled with but is by no means any sort of “game” with goals — has really driven that point home.

At this point, I honestly think the console wars are over. All three consoles serve different demographics, and they all seem to be doing a good job at it. There’s some overlap, of course — the artsy Braid on the 360, the “hardcore” and fanservice-y No More Heroes on the Wii — but for the most part the three consoles have trended toward those separate demographics. And console “power” thankfully, has also stopped being an issue; I know the PS3 is based around something called a “Cell processor”, and I have a very fuzzy idea of what the 360’s and Wii’s hardware is like, but none of those systems have any numeric information about their architecture anywhere on their cases (”Sega Genesis: 16-Bit”), their startup screens (”Neo-Geo: 100 Mega Shock!”) or, God forbid, their very names (”Turbo Grafx 16″ / “Nintendo 64″).

So, uh… HOORAY!

(Incidentally, it was this post by ThisMachineKillsFascists that pointed out the PS3’s artsy leanings to me and inspired me to write this in the first place.)

I’ve spent a lot of time hating Everyday Shooter.

It started as an offshoot of my hatred for the Independent Games Festival; in 2006, knowing very little about the IGF competition and “indie gaming” in general, I submitted Season Stacker, a Gameboy Advance game that I’d poured lots of blood, sweat, tears, and my own money into, and which I felt was a solid — albeit not very original — puzzle game. When the finalists were announced, I discovered that my precious little game was not on the list, and was further mortified to discover that it had been beaten out by games generally falling into two categories: games with budgets large enough that it seemed a sin to call them “indie” (like Darwinia) and games that nobody outside of academia had ever heard of or even seen a single screenshot of (like Braid). I denounced the whole IGF competition as a confederacy of dunces, and ran off to cry into a pillow.

The next year, I watched with distant contempt as the IGF competition awarded three of its prizes to yet another game nobody had ever heard of — a game so pretentious that it was titled “Everyday Shooter”. If I’d have known the song Common People at the time, it surely would’ve run through my head; oh yes, an “everyday shooter” for “everyday people”, written by some trust-fund twat so far removed from the everyday world that he wouldn’t know an “everyday shooter” if it ripple lasered him in the ass. When the trailer was released, it didn’t do much to sway my opinion, spouting pretentious nonsense about God and music with a few short clips that did nothing to explain what the game was actually about or how it played. Eventually I learned that it was some sort of “move with one joystick and shoot with the other” game, and I shouted to the uncaring heavens “What is this?? My puzzle game wasn’t good enough for the IGF, but they shit their pants over a Geometry Wars clone???” Over the following months, a few of my acquaintances with more “indie gaming” cred got to play early builds of the game in elite, invite-only, closed-door sessions, but all they would say afterwards was something about music and synesthesia and how “it’s like an album” and I’d just roll my eyes. Finally, in October of last year, Everyday Shooter was released for the Playstation 3 — the official console of laughable hubris_TM — and I thought that that was just fine; the game nobody’s ever played could be exclusively released on the console that nobody owns, and they could just curl up in a corner and die together. Tycho from Penny Arcade wrote a whole paragraph about getting mesmerized by the fact that the opening menu makes guitar noises, and I figured that would finally be the last I’d ever hear of Everyday Shooter. And then this week it came out on Steam.

I know the early adopters had a lot of problems with it, but Steam’s always been good to me. I thought it was cool when I accidentally bought a DVD copy of HL2:Ep1 without having a DVD drive, and Steam just happily downloaded the game for me instead as soon as I fed it my authentication key. It really won me over after I bought the Orange Box, however, because ever since I did it’s like Steam’s been showing up at my house, unannounced, just to surprise me with wonderful and completely free presents, like additional TF2 maps, and new TF2 achievements, and little gameplay tweaks and additions that I hadn’t even realized I wanted until I had them. On top of that, it’s offered me great deals on games I’ve been meaning to check out, like Trackmania Nations Forever completely for free, and Prey for only five bucks.

So when Steam announced this week that they had the PC release of Everyday Shooter, and for only nine bucks (ten bucks after the 15th), I said “well fine! If I can finally find out what all those pretentious, elitist, closed-door, ironic-$200-boutique-t-shirt-wearing, fixy-bike-riding assholes with their “indie” game festivals and their PS3s think is SOOO terrific, for only nine bucks, then I’ll take it. But I’m sure as hell not gonna like it.”

God fucking dammit. I love Everyday Shooter.

I’ve finally found a game more hypnotic than Rez (albeit not quite as toe-tapping-ly catchy). The gameplay is nice and simple; yes, you DO move with one joystick and shoot with the other. Yes, it IS like an album, every one of the game’s eight levels lasts about three minutes, and is a variation on the game’s core mechanics, much like the songs on an album. In the first level, you shoot Every-Extend-lookin’ things to start Every-Extend-style chain reactions that blow up other enemies. In the second level, you fight stationary enemies whose color determines their attack, and who are related in a clever and visually subtle parent-child relationship such that detroying a parent creates a chain that destroys the children. And best of all, you can use the points you score in the game to buy additional starting lives (among other things) so that even people who are as bad at these kinds of games as I am can beat the game eventually.

So go get it. Right now. I still think that the IGF giving awards to games that nobody’s ever heard of, nobody’s ever played, and nobody even gets to play for over a year after they win the award is the absolute height of elitist, pretentious bullshit and a huge black eye for the video game industry, but now that Everyday Shooter is finally available to us “everyday people”, I’m shocked to discover that I really really like the game itself.

I bet Braid is gonna be terrible, though. (The wink emoticon suggests that I’m kidding! Or maybe not! Wink!)

In closing, I’d just like to say that I didn’t mean for this post to sound so “new games journalism”-ey. It looks like that’s kind of the way Inverted Castle is headed these days, so if you can stomach it please stick around, but if you can’t then I won’t blame you for leaving. I promise I’ll try to keep things on-topic as much as possible, and won’t go on long reminiscences about having sex with Japanese girls.

I checked my RSS feeds today to discover not one but two great free game downloads available today.

The first is the demo of Noitu Love 2. Created by Joakim Sandberg, who also made Chalk, this is the sequel to his first major game project, Noitu Love and the Army of the Grinning Darns. The first Noitu love was an excellent game with some nagging pacing issues and a few obviously-made-in-a-game-maker technical rough edges, but as you can tell from the screenshots this sequel is a huge improvement, both in graphics and in gameplay, and has some very fluid platformer+mouse mechanics that are clearly evolved from both Noitu Love 1 and Chalk.

The second game is World Reborn, an interesting horizontal shmup with experience points for the Gameboy Advance. It was apparently finished just a little while after Gameboy Advance games stopped being made, so rather than cast it into the void the developers made the wise and magnanimous choice to release it for free. Hopefully this move will help them find a publisher for their next game.

EDIT: The full version of Noitu Love 2 is now available for $20, which is the price that all videogames should be. Go get it now!

Jeff Fulton over at 8-Bit Rocket has declared himself a mid-core gamer, and since his points match up nicely with the sort of “too hard for Bejeweled, too soft for coordinated 8-hour epic raids, gimme a 2-hour game for $20, and get off my lawn!” cane-waving rants that I’ve frequently posted here, I’ll go ahead and call myself a mid-core gamer, too. I’ll even go so far as to wildly and baselessly say that mid-core gamers are the fastest-growing video game market in the world, so big video game companies had better start catering to us if they know what’s good for them! I also suspect that Dan Cook will jump on this bandwagon as well, albeit on a different part of the wagon that doesn’t have any tricky platforms.

And speaking of baseless hyperbole, Five Short Video Game Industry Keynotes filled me with glee. GLEE!! So you should go check that out.

UPDATE: Preach it, my brother!!