My favorite video game of all time is Rakugaki Showtime, which intentionally looks like the graphics were drawn by a 10-year-old with too much sugar and a box of crayons. Lately I’ve fallen in love with Rhythm Tengoku and many of the games in the bit Generations series, both of which have extremely simple, minimalist graphics. A fan emailed me about my audio-only game In the Pit declaring “well, this certainly settles the whole ‘gameplay versus graphics’ argument” (can you smell the hubris????). And yet still, to this day, the first thing I look for in any new game I hear about is screenshots.

That’s not to say that screenshots haven’t served me well so far; screenshots and gameplay movies sold me on Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, Ninja Gaiden, and Gekisou Tomarunner, all of which are great-looking games that also happen to have excellent gameplay. But screenshots and gameplay movies actually drove me away from Rhythm Tengoku and bit Generations, until tons of positive reviews from friends and on message boards convinced me to check them out. It took me a long time to discover Warioware, DDR, and Cave Story, simply because I couldn’t “get it” from the screenshots and gameplay movies I saw, but now they’re among my favorite games (seriously, would this screenshot convince you that Cave Story is one of the best games ever made for the PC?). And I won’t even begin to list the mountain of games that I bought solely on the screenshots, only to discover that the gameplay was utterly horrible.

What I’m saying here is that it’s time for a paradigm shift. Slowly but surely, I need to hammer into the tiny reptilian part of my brain that responds excitedly to pretty pictures and un-well to simplistic pictures that screenshots are not the final word on a game’s quality. Unfortunately, screenshots are the quickest word on a game’s quality, and I always glance over at a game’s screenshot before reading the text of a review or preview, coloring my judgement before I actually know anything about the game. Gamespot’s video reviews are a good compromise, reporting the text of the review over gameplay videos so I can simultaneously satiate my pretty-colors-hungry reptilian brain and the analytical rest of my brain that actually has to play the game if I get it, but even then if the screenshots didn’t interest me I’m unlikely to check out the video review in the first place, and Gamespot can only afford to do video reviews of so many games anyway.

The first step is going to be forcing myself to check out games that have been recommended to me, or praised by people whose opinions I respect, even if the screenshots look absolutely awful. Granted, I’ve played a lot of ugly games with horrible gameplay, but I’ve played just as many beautiful games with horrible gameplay and know (consciously, at least) that simplistic graphics and awful gameplay don’t necessarily go together. The next step is going to be to do away with screenshots and gameplay movies entirely, or at least sever all of my connections between a gameplay’s screenshots and my expectations of its quality, and play games I’ve never seen before based entirely on what people say about them. I’ll let you know how that works out; in the best possible situation, I’m expecting to find a lot of missed gems (which I’ll subsequently share with you here on Inverted Castle) while also whittling down whose opinions on games I most agree with, and who’s been pumping themselves full of magic monkey juice and taking a trip to space land.

Any other suggestions, either on visually-unimpressive games I need to check out, or ways in which I can break my screenshot-habit (besides gouging out my own eyes, please), are very welcome.

Special thanks to Broco for the awesome animated gif of the “onion plucking” level from Rhythm Tengoku.

I wanted to quickly post about The Rabbit Snare, a cool new site dedicated to creating English translations of rare and wonderful interviews that only exist in Japanese. I just finished reading their translation of an interview with Satoru Iwata, who is my personal favorite “rags to riches” game industry story; he started out as a dirt-poor programmer, eating nothing but ramen and working 30-hour days to make the first Kirby and Mother games, and now he’s president of Nintendo. If that isn’t a shining inspiration for the rest of us dirt-poor programmers, I don’t know what is.

Meatier post about something else coming soon…

About a year ago, Rockstar Games (famous for the Grand Theft Auto series) announced that they were developing a new game called “Bully“, and kept very tight-lipped about it, releasing little more than a promotional image of a Puggsly Addams look-alike standing at the gates of a school. This led to a huge uproar among headline-hungry dipshits who claimed that it would be everything from “Grand Theft Auto’s hooker killing repackaged for children” to a “Columbine Simulator”. Yesterday, Rockstar finally and smugly revealed that the game was completely the opposite; you play a schoolyard hero who fights against the bullies, and has to figure out clever, indirect, and/or non-violent ways to deal with them, since direct violence will result in punishments that are designed to be tedious and reminiscent of real-life school punishments like writing on the blackboard and being scolded by the principal. The game industry and parents let our a collective cheer, and now the dipshits are backpedalling like crazy, promising that there MUST be some sort of objectionable content buried in the game somewhere, and surely one of those evil, hellspawned “video games” couldn’t ACTUALLY be teaching kids non-violent conflict resolution.

And now today the Illinois district court has ruled that Illinois’ recent knee-jerk laws against selling M-rated games to children are unconstitutional and a waste of taxpayer money, and that it is parents’ responsibility to regulate what kinds of “dangerous expressions of free speech” their children are exposed to, not the state’s. Then the court ordered the state to pay the Entertainment Software Association’s legal fees.

(Sorry that link to NYTimes requires registration, but the text following it pretty much sums it up.)

Oops. Well, it’s been 3 months since I said I was going to post monthly about any game design competitions I’d heard of. To my credit, though, I haven’t heard of any new game design competitions in those 3 months except for these two:

• JayIsGames is holding a flash game design competition. The theme is “simple puzzle games”, along the lines of the puzzles in Myst or… uh… one of the 9 billion clones of Myst. It ends on August 25th, and a DS Lite and 2 copies of Flash 8 will be distributed among the winners.
• The Experimental Gameplay Project is holding a second competition, and to their credit this one sounds a whole lot more experimental than the first one. The theme is to make a game that is not a dancing game but uses a DDR pad. To qualify for the first round, send in your game idea (you don’t have to have anything coded at this point) by August 11th. That’s this Friday, so get a move on!
• An anonymous commenter also suggests Java Unlimited’s Super Mario Programming Contest, which gives entrants until October 1st to design a Super Mario Bros. fan game in Java. Prizes include copies of Tribal Trouble and Wurm Online, and an exciting green 1-Up hat! Hooray!

Also remember that the Slamdance and Armor Games competitions from my last competition post are still on as well. If you know of a current competition that I have missed please tell me about it in this post’s comments!

Good luck!

There’s apparently been a lot of hullaballoo about how video games need a “Lester Bangs” to give them legitimacy. Who the fuck is Lester Bangs? When I first read this, I thought it was a call for more Leeroy Jenkins, which was even more confusing.

OK, fine, for the sake of sounding like something approaching a well-researched video game blog, I’ll go find out who Lester Bangs is. Oh boy, he’s yet another opinionated, rambling, “new journalist”, who used his “reviews” to spout off about what a cockmaster he was with only a cursory mention of whatever he was supposed to be reviewing. Yeah, we already have one of those. His name is Tim Rogers.

Tim, please hurry up and overdose on Darvon while playing Killer7 sometime soon so we can all get rich writing self-congratulating books and articles about your “legacy” and what an unappreciated visionary genius you were. Then we can say “We did have a Lester Bangs! It was Tim motherfucking Rogers, but you bastards, you crucified him!” Then we can put your face on t-shirts and get rich off those too.

KTHXBYE.

Update: Actually, come to think of it, Tim isn’t nearly mainstream enough; I doubt Lester Bangs got to wherever it was that he got to by reviewing obscure Japanese albums that were never released in the U.S. So… uh, replace “Tim Rogers” in the above post with “Penny Arcade”, and replace “Killer7″ with “World of Warcraft”. There, that fixes everything. Tim! Do NOT overdose on Darvon!

Update: Holy crap, Stephen Swift of Polybius has written an incredible rebuttal to this article. Thanks Stephen!!

Dynamite Headdy. Cave Story. Hitogata Happa. Why are so many of the most difficult video games also the cutest? Maybe my brain just automatically forgets games that are both ugly and frustrating. Added to the “cute but evil” list comes Within a Deep Forest, a completely free game that casts you as a little blue ball, bouncing around a delightfully whimsical little world filled with the most frustrating jumping puzzles known to man. According to the plot, the evil Dr. Cliché has attempted twice to build a world-freezing ice-bomb; the first attempt was a total failure, and resulted in a sentient, bouncing blue ball (that’s you). The second attempt succeeded, and now the clock is ticking, and only you can save the world. Even though “the clock is ticking” according to the plot, there is no time limit, so you have plenty of time to take breaks now and then to watch the adorable creatures and Fraggle-like people who decorate most screens, going about their daily lives more or less oblivious to your presence.

Surprisingly, the game was created with Multimedia Fusion, but shows no signs of it, and has none of the problems that usually plague games made with game creators. The graphics are equally adorable and beautiful, the soothing music goes a long way toward keeping you from destroying all humans when you die for the 900th time, and the sound effects are perfect, with each of the 10 different types of balls you can become making a different and wholly appropriate bouncing sound. There’s exploration, there are power-ups (in the form of getting different types of balls), there are plenty of secrets; I’d even be tempted to call it “Metroid-like”, although there is no mapping feature and there are no bosses. Unfortunately, it’s also incredibly frustrating. The cuteness goes a long way toward compensating for the frustration, however, and in the end it just barely won out enough to encourage me to complete it; despite the cuteness, this is certainly not a “casual game”. If you’re “hardcore”, though, and live for frustration, then this is definitely the game for you, and it even has a “Speed Run” feature with an online scoreboard so you can show the world just how absolutely superhuman you are.

Thanks to the insert credit forums for the tip!

I have a half-finished article about ways in which I think the video game industry could benefit from being more like the movie industry, which I’ll post when it’s finished. In the mean time, the item at the top of the list is “lots of little game festivals”, similar to all the tiny college film festivals that exist all over the world. A steady trickle of tiny cash prizes from various tiny festivals for his short film Bed Head bought Robert Rodriguez many a dinner while he was working on El Mariachi.

To that end, here’s a short list of game programming competitions and festivals that I’m currently aware of. I’m going to try to put together one of these lists every month of all the game competitions and festivals currently going on. If you know of something that’s not in this list, please tell me about it in the comments.

• After the success of their “Horizontal Shooter With Boss” competition, Shmup-Dev has announced their second competition, which is dragon-themed, and ends on July 1st, 2006.
• The Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition ends September 30th, 2006. It has a $25k maximum budget limit on games, and a $45 entry fee. There doesn’t appear to be any starting-time limit, so you can polish off older projects that are gathering dust and submit those. This is the closest thing to the “many little game festivals” ideal I’m aiming for.
• Armor Games has just started their 4th Flash Game Contest, which also ends September 31st. As one would suspect from the title, it’s limited to Flash games. Scoring in the competition is based on how well the game does on New Grounds. They have some very impressive prizes, and bonuses for using Stick Figures and for 4th of July themed games.
• Funny Junk is also running a Flash Game Competition, which ends May 20th. They allow 5 submissions per person, and the submissions do not have to be new material. The first prize is an iPod Nano, and the second and third prizes are iPod Shuffles.

Couldn’t be the only blog not to write something about the Wii, could I?

I think I’ve figured out the rationale behind the name. In Japanese, “we” is erroneously thought to be the English translation of the Japanese word “minna”, which actually means “everybody” (as in “Minna Daisuke Katamari Damacy”, which literally means “Everybody Loves Katamari Damacy” — hence the game’s theme of a world full of people who want to help the prince — but was released in the English-speaking world as “We Love Katamari Damacy”). The Japanese language actually does this a lot; misusing foreign words (like using the word “viking” to mean “buffet” or the word “mansion” to mean “condominium”), or even using made-up words that sound English (like “freeter” or “skinship“), the same way that English uses the Japanese word “hentai” specifically to describe anime/manga porn.

So, since “we” is mistranslated in Japan to literally mean “everybody”, it makes perfect sense in Japan for this to be the name of the console; it’s the console for everybody, and everyone in Japan will automatically think “everybody” and “community” when they hear/see the word “Wii”, just like Americans automatically think “anime porn” when they hear the word “hentai”. Unfortunately, we can only assume that Nintendo either didn’t do enough English-language market research, or only questioned American ex-pats who had lived in Japan so long that they’d forgotten English slang, since in the English-speaking world the word “wee” means “urine”, “penis”, or “small and weak”, depending on the context. Especially with the ambiguous spelling of “Wii”, these purile definitions are the first to spring to mind; in an informal poll I ran yesterday after the announcement of the new name, an equal number of people immediately thought “urine”, “penis”, or “small and weak” upon reading/hearing the word “Wii”, and absolutely zero people thought it meant “We” (incidentally, the most people just thought it was a typo of “Wifi”).

I hope that Nintendo’s hubris will not prevent them from changing the name of the system in the English-speaking market (after all, the Famicom and Super Famicom had different names outside of Japan, where the name “Famicom” was perceived as being kind of… “wee”). The fact that their marketing department has to keep telling people “‘Wii’ sounds bad initially, but once you go to our website and read the little blurb about how it really means ‘We’ and ‘togetherness’ it totally makes sense” should be a major indicator that something’s wrong, since the “everybody” market that they’re trying to reach isn’t going to go to their website and read their blurb, they’re just going to see the “Nintendo Wii” on the shelf at their local Walmart, laugh at it, and buy some other console whose name doesn’t conjure images of a tiny penis squirting urine instead.

Finally, it should be noted that this is not the most eggregious instance of English-language-market-research-failure in the video game industry; that honor goes to Sega’s “Seaman” which, to drive the point home, was released with a special, limited edition, semi-transparent-white, “Seaman”-colored Dreamcast. But then, “Seaman” was just one game (which, probably due to the name, didn’t do nearly as well in America as it had in Japan), while the “Wii” is an entire console.

Back in August, insert credit (”the other IC”) posted about an amazing little doujin manic shooter called Hitogata Happa (ヒトガタハッパ, which translates to “person-shaped leaves”). I played it then and fell in love with it, but it was quickly buried under all the other doujin games I found around the same time (including Melty Blood ReACT and the works of Team Shanghai Alice). In February I dug it up again, fell in love with it even more, and endeavoured to buy the full version of the game. Yesterday, after two months and half a dozen different shops, it finally arrived, and I have to say that the full version was well worth the wait, and is even significantly better than the incredible two-level glimpse of gameplay offered by the demo.

“Bullet Hell” fans will dig it immediately; this game has the most gorgeous “screen filling patterns of colorful enemy bullets that are all trying to kill you” I’ve ever seen, which it compliments with a sort of Miyazaki-esque design to the enemy ships, and wonderfully catchy music. The player’s ships are “dolls”, cute little characters with plant names like “Leaf” and “Clover” and “Rooty”. Between levels, you spend your points to buy additional dolls (4 different kinds are available in the demo, 8 in the full game) each of which, naturally, has a different primary attack and special move. Something all the dolls have in common, however, is a sort of “kamikaze” ability that causes significant damage in exchange for sacrificing a doll, and is mandatory for beating most of the bosses (be sure to watch the demonstration game, which plays if you sit at the main menu long enough, to get a feel for how and when to use the “kamikaze” ability). The difficulty, which I’m told is standard for Murasame’s games, is very challenging; I was able to muscle my way through easy mode in about 3 hours, but I haven’t even gotten past the first boss yet on normal mode, which makes Do Don Pachi look like a cakewalk. And then there are two more difficulty modes after normal. The easy mode was near the upper limit of my shooter-skill, but I’m really not very good at shooters overall, so the subsequent difficulties should keep the game challenging for even the most hardcore players.

Greg, if you’re reading this (which you probably are, since I’m going to email you about it right after I post it), this is exactly the kind of game I had in mind when I suggested you look into “the doujin game scene” for Manifesto; it runs perfectly on an American PC with no special language-support trickery, everything is either in English or easily discerned from context, so no knowledge of Japanese is necessary, and (as far as I can tell) all of the characters are original, so there would be none of the licensing headache inherent in derivative doujin games. Once you get Manifesto up and running, I would be more than happy to fly to Japan on your dime to go to Comiket and convince the makers of this game to join up. X

For anyone who wants the game right now (and if you like shooting games at all you should want it right now), first download the demo, and then when you fall in love with that and start jonesing for the full version I recommend ordering it through HimeyaShop, a Japanese doujin soft carrier that I’ve found to be the easiest to order from outside of Japan. (Update: HimeyaShop is no longer carrying it, but probably will carry it again at some point in the near future. For some reason, this is how doujin soft works; it’s available, and then it isn’t, and you just have to wait until it shows up again.)

Update: I forgot to mention that, when I first ran the full version of the game, the screen was off-center in full-screen mode. To fix it, I just went into “Options” and changed “Frame Control” from “Timer” to “VSynch”, and now all is hunky-dory. So… do that if you’re experiencing the same problem.

friend: So I was looking into that Tokimemo MMO, and discovered an interesting thing. PCs can *only* date designated NPCs. There is *no* PC-PC romantic interaction.

me: That is strange; maybe they’re just following the mold of all other MMORPGs, and sort of shoe-horning the “date-ables” into the role usually filled by monsters. You start out dating the really ugly girls, and once you grind on them for a while you move up to the slightly less ugly girls. Eventually you can get high enough to do “team raids” on legendary girls, for epic loot!

friend: See, I knew you were going to go there.