Editorials
Being okay with sucking at Hero Academy
Feb 16th
Hero Academy is one of the "it" games for iOS right now. Doug happens to be really bad at it.
I suck at Hero Academy.
I’ve played a half-dozen games against site contributor Tyler and lost each of them. I’ve started playing another friend, too, and have summarily lost to him as well. As I write this I’m in the process of starting another game, surely to be lost. Hero Academy isn’t a simple game — it’s a turn-based strategy-ish game that uses asynchronous multiplayer and the shuffling of your deck to keep you on your toes. I’m consistently over-aggressive and trying to rein that in is proving difficult. Plus every game is against a human, making things even trickier. The turn-based nature of combat allows you to plot out what to do next — and to contemplate how it all went wrong.
Why do I keep coming back, though? Well, it’s fun. But what does that mean? Many people smarter than me have done studies and a conclusion to draw is that playing games we enjoy taps into pleasure centers in our brains. Do something right in a game, get a little squirt of happiness into your nervous system (or, suggested in the above article, get MORE than on average from other activities). This, writ large, is gaming.
So playing games feeds into a chemical dependency. But what I like and what you like are very different things – taste is, of course, relative – and how we define fun is what drives variety. I’m loving trying to solve the riddle of Hero Academy, especially as unwrapping Tyler’s strategy makes learning almost double the work compared with a single-player game. AI routines aren’t quite good enough yet to change strategies completely or also mess around with your head. I may not be successful right now, but I’m enjoying the process and hopefully will be successful sooner than later. My brain likes what it gets from this game; it clicks. It’s why I like the Kairosoft games on iPhone, it’s why I like Tiny Tower, and it’s why I put endless hours into soccer and racing games on consoles.
Perfect like the 2008 Detroit Lions.
Sometimes, however, my synapses don’t click with games, and that can be frustrating. Even more so, it’s frustrating when they’re games that so many people love. It’s really sad to admit as a hardcore gamer, but I haven’t played all the way through a Zelda game ever; I’ve only finished one JRPG, and only ever started one Final Fantasy game. Ditto with Starcraft, Pokemon, Half-Life, and Call of Duty. It’s not that these are bad games or not games I could like; they just don’t grab me. Other games lock me in a vice and suck the life out of me. There’s a reason why I put hundreds of hours into Konami’s Pro Evo Soccer games.
Does this make me a bad gamer? I’m conflicted. Is it enough to give something a chance? Does it mean I’m inherently broken if I don’t get sucked in by games that are universally praised as great?
It’s an interesting and difficult question to ponder. But in the meantime, I’ll continue playing Hero Academy and (most likely) losing.
Why Double Fine’s Kickstarter project matters
Feb 12th
The Post-Publisher Era
As with all industries, the internet has turned the video game economy on its head. Ask anybody with a broadband connection and an internet-ready entertainment device how they consume most of their entertainment and it’s pretty likely that they’re getting a good chunk of their media through direct-download systems. Whether it’s movies and television through Netflix or Hulu or game downloads via Xbox Live or PlayStation Network, content providers are quickly learning just how lucrative a direct point-of-sale connection to their consumer base can be.
An entire new subset of the games industry has come to thrive in this new marketplace — the mid-budget indie game. Tiny developers like Playdead and Number None were able to have a dramatic effect on the gaming space with their stunningly creative and highly polished games. And in looking at the mobile space, there’s a much more diverse and, in my opinion, profound transformation taking place in gaming with an inexpensive, low-friction ecosystem for consumers to dive into.
But there’s an even more profound transformation taking place in the PC-gaming space. Indie poster-child Mojang has seen an unprecedented success with Minecraft, which has sold nearly five million copies at a going rate of nearly $27 as of this writing. Considering this is the work of just a handful of people, the return on a game like Minecraft is dizzying to anyone who follows the machinations of the games industry — and nothing short of inspiring to an up-and-coming developer.
So What About Double Fine?
Double Fine’s no stranger to the downloadable space, having released a quartet of creative, fun titles over the various digital distros in the last year or so, but this latest venture with Kickstarter is something else entirely.
The project is simply known as Double Fine Adventure. The details are relatively sparse, but if you’re familiar with Double Fine’s history and the track record of veteran designers Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, the premise is damn exciting:
- A classic point-and-click adventure game developed by Tim Schafer and a small team within Double fine
- An ongoing documentary covering the game’s production produced by 2 Player Productions, famous for producing the first season of Penny Arcade: The Series and the upcoming Minecraft documentary
- An entirely fan-funded endeavor that bypasses the traditional developer-publisher system; instead, the fans cover the costs and Double Fine releases directly through Steam
Personally, I can’t wait to play this game and to follow along with the documentary-style updates. But what’s got me most excited is how a relatively well-established game developer has decided to eschew the traditional publisher relationship and all the benefits that come along with it in favor of charting its own course. The barrier to releasing a game on Steam is relatively small, so much so that it’s probably a safe wager that people would be willing to fork over $15 directly to a developer in exchange for a cool new game that targets a “dead” genre with a small but highly devoted band of supporters.
Double Fine’s initial goal: $400,000, with $300,000 going to the game’s development and $100,000 funding the documentary. And now, less than a week since the Kickstarter went live, they’ve more than quadrupled that fundraising target with a month left to go.
I have a feeling Double Fine knew they’d hit the $400,000 mark with some time to spare. But I don’t think anyone saw this happening. As an idealist and as somebody who tends to sympathize with the sort of people who give a shit about supporting high-quality work, it’s been wonderful watching the dollar total rise daily. I couldn’t have been happier to fork over $30 to guarantee a copy of the game and its soundtrack as well as a high-definition download of the documentary series. As a kid who grew up playing Schafer’s classic point-and-click adventures until I’d nearly memorized their entire scripts, there’s something so comforting to know there are throngs of people out there who remember just how great an experience that style of play can be.
So Now What?
I don’t know. I guess we’ll see what happens. Double Fine certainly isn’t the first company to raise money for a game on Kickstarter, but it’s by far the most visible — and it’s had what has to be the greatest financial success in doing so.
There’s been a lot of talk about what this means for the future of games, such as:
* Are publishers necessary any more? (Yeah, probably)
* Will we see more well-known game devs reaching out to fans directly to finance games? (Absolutely)
* Is this a good thing for game developers? (I think so)
The social internet is a wildly transformative beast, and Double Fine’s Kickstarter experiment is solid proof of that. This sort of thing never could have happened even four years ago. But today it’s 2012, and more than ever, people have the power to share the things they care about with the people they know. Word-of-mouth has always been a force to be reckoned with, but as this Kickstarter shows, it’s now moving with unprecedented virality. There’s a nimbleness to the way that word about this game spread that no publisher could ever hope to replicate, even with a multimillion-dollar advertising budget and countless purchased cover stories in the gaming press.
It’s only going to get more interesting from here.
So Long, Sera
Oct 23rd
I didn’t really want an Xbox 360 at first. Or at least, that’s the story I used to tell myself.
I’m one of the idiots who actually made a point of tuning in to MTV’s sophomoric unveiling of Microsoft’s sophomore console in the fall of 2004, and the embarrassing spectacle left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. And to be clear, at that point my Xbox was my primary gaming machine. I kept my Gamecube and PlayStation 2 at the ready for the few wonderful games that were still trickling in (GTA: San Andreas, Resident Evil 4 and Shadow of the Colossus…what a great period for gaming) but with Halo 2 burning up the University Housing intranet, nothing in my dorm room got more play than my Xbox.*
But with a weak launch lineup and a massive price tag, the Xbox 360 didn’t sway me right away. No surprises there. I held off until 2003 to get an original Xbox, after all. But the Xbox 360? No thanks – I’ll stick to my standard-def consoles for now.
That was my mandate, and it served me well. Then it was late 2006, and my buddy Dan invited me over to play Gears of War.
The next day, I bought an Xbox 360.
The Long Break, or Doug’s hiatus from console gaming
Oct 8th
Welcome to the Japanese countryside! There are video games here, you just have to squint really hard to find them.
Whenever I’ve moved, one of the last things to get packed up has been my gaming console. Of course, my console has also often been the first thing unpacked once I’ve gotten moved in. Funny how that works. But this time, after moving to Japan in early August, all I’ve played since are iPhone games – until last weekend, I hadn’t picked up a real controller since arriving in the land of Nintendo and Sony.
What the hell happened? Well, a perfect storm of things for me, at least.
First: I didn’t want to bring my Xbox 360 with me to Japan. It’s old, is bound to break (again), and is region-locked. Most importantly, though, I would either have to pack it into my slim luggage allowance or ship it over separately, and neither are worth the trouble. Sometimes you have to be an adult and bring clothing, especially when there’s little chance to buy new threads. Okay, I did bring my Nintendo DS, but it’s now gathering Japanese dust instead of gathering American dust. I’ve got the itch to play games; what to do?
But I can wait. Maybe. I’ve gone two months without playing a game – and longer without playing anything new, frankly – and can afford to wait because real life and the gaming release schedule have allowed me to. I’m too busy getting out of the house and visiting my new friends to spend too much time playing games at the moment, which is good, because there haven’t been a ton of AAA titles coming out this summer. I bemoaned the lack of a year-round release schedule earlier in the year, but I’m quite glad for the break at the moment.
Soon the weather will turn nasty and, as a friend here in Japan said, people will begin to “hide under their kotatsu.” Unlike the U.S., most places in Japan aren’t centrally heated and have very poor insulation, which means you wear lots of sweaters indoors and a kotatsu, a table with a heated blanket. In short, people don’t want to head out and be social; perfect time to catch up on video games, then!
Postscript to the story? Last weekend was my birthday. With enough money and free time on the weekend to go buy a PS3, I broke down and picked one up — a 320 gb model, which now sits happily next to my TV and wireless router. It’s now set up to stream media from my computer, access my U.S. Netflix account, and make use of the Silicon Sasquatch staff PSN share. And I bought a pretty kick-ass game to go along with the system, too, one that I’m excited to write about soon.
After the long break, it’s good to be back.
Catherine’s Eccentricities
Aug 14th
I still don’t get Catherine. Even after a few solid hours spent learning the ropes of Atlus’ bizarre hodgepodge puzzle and dating-sim gameplay (think Q*Bert meets Tokimeki Memorial), I’m still unsure if this is a game I like. I’m compelled to keep playing, though, and that’s a success as far as I’m concerned.
But it’s not the puzzle-game aspects that have me hooked. The block-moving, tower-climbing action sequences that define the “game” part of Catherine are perfectly fine — controls are tight, difficulty ramps up at a good clip, pacing is appropriate — but to me, they’re just filler. The real fun of Catherine comes from the story that unfolds as you delve deeper into protagonist Vincent’s sordid love life. The choices you make through him are surprisingly revealing — not about Vincent, of course, but about you and everyone else who plays.
Sorry
Jul 24th
I don’t mean to speak out of turn here, but things are kind of dead at Silicon Sasquatch. The why of it might not matter to you, but in an effort to be transparent, here’s where we’re at:
- Aaron’s working and living his life in Portland. I’m not sure what he’s been up to, actually, which bums me out.
- Doug’s leaving to go teach in Japan in a matter of days.
- Tyler’s back home in the States for a brief visit, but he’ll also be going back to Japan.
- Spencer is, presumably, doing the Seattle thing.
- My work and social lives are both great, but when combined, they’re all-consuming.
That’s all well and good. I’d argue that we’re all in better places right now than we were a year or two ago, and ultimately, that’s probably what matters most.
There’s just one problem: I miss this blog like hell.
For me and Aaron, and for Doug too, this site symbolized our post-collegiate aspirations. The story’s old-hat by now and way too commonplace in our generation to have any significance to a third party, but you can imagine our situation: we were all broke, depressed and — more often than not — stuck living in our parents’ proverbial basements. (Very few houses have basements these days.) Like kids, we wanted to pretend that we could fulfill our dreams. It’s probably not coincidental that those dreams revolved around a product whose core appeal is escapism.
If I were a pessimist, I’d say we had been incredibly naïve over the last few years. But that’s not true. We’ve gained so much from building a product together, from the countless meetings and hundreds of hours spent writing and editing, from both the close calls and the landmark achievements.
As a person grows older, they realize that wisdom can be defined as an increased awareness of how little a person is capable of knowing. We had high hopes for this blog — dreams of wish-fulfillment, of self-made success, of a career founded in idealism and passion.
Looking back on what we’ve done with this blog in less than three years, I’m shocked at just how big an accomplishment it is. If we hadn’t had Silicon Sasquatch, Aaron and I would have probably just kept playing World of Warcraft. We wouldn’t have learned nearly as much about entrepreneurship, journalistic integrity and creative problem-solving. Without our self-imposed editing standards, we’d be a lot more attached to our writing, and the writing we’d produce would be so much shittier. We wouldn’t have a real, tangible, hard-copy book with our names on it. We wouldn’t be published authors. I can confidently say that I wouldn’t be where I am today if not for the hard work we all put in on this project.
So why am I writing this? Why here, and why now?
I feel like I just came home after decades abroad and discovered some old, forgotten car caked in dust and cobwebs in a dank garage. It used to be something, and what it used to be still resonates with me today. And I bet if I learned to appreciate that, I’d find the direction and willpower to fix it up and make it better than ever.
So, guys — what do you think?
It’d have to be different this time around. We’d have to embrace some big changes and accept that we won’t be able to do things the old way. But when I think about what this blog represents for me, and all the hope that it inspired in me through some of the roughest years of my life — I mean, come on.
Why the fuck not?
Summertime Blues: Should Gaming Embrace Summer Blockbusters?
Jun 2nd
Iron Man 2 was one of the top-grossing movies of the 2010 summer blockbuster season. If it's good for movies, why can't it work for games?
It’s just past Memorial Day weekend in the United States, the traditional harbinger of summertime. In recent years, it’s also brought in the beginning of the summer movie season, where studios push their big-budget releases and all sorts of associated goods and tie-ins. You can’t swing a major tent-pole movie without hitting Movie: The Action Figure, Movie: The Fast-Food Deal, Movie: The Sports Advertising Tie-In, and, yes, Movie: The Video Game. It’s marketing gone mad, sure, but it creates a ton of money for all involved.
However, it begs the question: where’s the summer blockbuster period for gaming? If it’s proved such a big hit with movie crowds, why not with gamers?
It’s an interesting thought.
Three’s Company: How Pigsy stumbled in and totally ruined a great thing in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
May 31st
Monkey and Trip traverse the feral, post-apocalyptic United States in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
A good game tells the story of a lone protagonist, an archetypal hero the player relates to and guides toward success. Thanks to the immersive nature of video games, an experience doesn’t need to be perfectly refined to draw the player in. After all, many player characters are essentially faceless empty shells — digital vessels just waiting for the player to dump a few dozen hours and countless arbitrary achievements into.
And that’s fine; a good game is a good game. But it’s not a great game.
A great game channels something deeper, elusive, and much more delicate than simply bringing a handful of characters to life. Anybody can make a game about a person or even multiple people, but a game that empowers the player to give life to meaningful relationships between its characters — that’s the biggest creative risk you can take. That’s the mark of greatness.
What Happens When the Curtains Close? Xbox Live, PSN, and the Next Generation
May 13th
At some point in the not-too-distant future, there will be successors to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii. Okay, so I’m hardly a psychic making a statement like that, but such is the march of progress that new consoles will inevitably replace the old. We know Nintendo will show something off at E3, and the rumors are starting to rumble that Microsoft may have something up its sleeve this year, too.
But one question that has never faced gamers before will be an issue when looking at upgrading from one console to the next this go-around: What is going to happen to all the content I have on my current system?
This is the digital era. I have 85 gb of content stored to my Xbox 360′s hard drive and, while much of that is game installs, the rest is made up of the “arcade” games available on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN, downloadable add-on content for games, and digital downloads of full retail games. Some of the downloaded games also have their own DLC, which strikes me as a real through-the-looking-glass sort of moment.
Full copies of games you'd otherwise purchase at retail are available both on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. What happens with the next generation of systems, though?
These are games I’ve bought and, in the case of the digital versions of games also sold at retail, are indistinguishable from hard copies. Yet I’m worried. I’m worried that these games could be completely worthless or, at the least, feature-handicapped in the future should Microsoft (or Sony for PSN) decide to flip a switch and shut off some servers. In the case of the Xbox 360, though the detachable hard drive means it’s possible to take your content on the go, you can only make use of DLC and full versions of games if they’re authenticated by Xbox Live; if I want to take my hard drive to a friend’s and make use of my Rock Band library, their 360 must be plugged in.
The authentication and access to games isn’t just a worry in cases like that, but for more practical reasons as well. The 360 has proven itself to be a bit fragile; my current 360 is my fifth, and I’m hardly an edge case. If you suffer a Red Ring of Death or any other kind of 360-killing malady, you have to migrate your account from the old console to the new one’s serial number. While it’s an annoyance during the 360′s life span, what happens in another five years? If your old NES or Genesis or even PlayStation 2 died, you just buy a new one; the games were kept within a physical medium and plug right in without a problem. But what happens in five or 10 years when my 360 inevitably dies again and I have to track down a replacement? Will Xbox Live still allow me to do what it does now in 2011?
While content on the current console is a question, what about taking content on to the next generation? Though few games had DLC on the original Xbox, you could previously download it on the 360; now, though, since the original Xbox’s Xbox Live servers have gone offline, it’s left you high and dry. While I doubt people will want to buy new content, even for Xbox 360 games in the far-flung future, what about retrieving what you’ve already purchased? Plus, as established, content delivery digitally is a much bigger deal this generation; that will be important to keep in mind, but it’s still Microsoft or Sony’s ball to take and go home with.
I’ll admit it’s all speculation and worry at this point, but admit it: a best-case scenario where everything still works, like in PC gaming, is probably a pipe dream. This is the point where I shake my fists at PC gamers sitting up in the cloud on Steam at this moment. But this is an issue that will be wider than gaming within the next 10 years; seeing the gaming industry’s reaction is going to be fascinating and, potentially, vital to digital rights beyond our favorite little corner of the entertainment world.