Anomaly Warzone Earth (PC)
Nifty take on “tower offense.” The formula grew a bit stale for me on PC because I felt like I didn’t have enough to do while I was waiting for my troops to reach the towers, but that might feel better on the iOS version where touching and panning is a bit more action-heavy than dragging a mouse.

Atom Zombie Smasher (PC)
The first of many Humble Indie Bundle pickups on this list, Atom Zombie Smasher is a charming top-down defense game. The presentation value sells the experience, much like in Firemint’s Flight Control. It’s a fun time-waster, worth the price of admission, but it doesn’t bring anything new to the genre so I don’t think I learned much from it as a designer.

Barkley: Shut Up & Jam Gaiden (PC)
Fantastic indie RPG that took me way too long to get around to playing. It’s absolutely hilarious from start to finish and features a battle system that rivals the Paper Mario games. You don’t have to be a sports fan to appreciate an epic drama in which the events of Space Jam are considered canonical.

Batman: Arkham City (PC)
It’s like Arkham Asylum, but more Batman-ier in all the right ways. Arkham City was probably my “game of the year” in terms of moment-to-moment joy while playing it. Again, like Saboteur and Assassin’s Creed, it gave me a map with a ton of dots on it, and I couldn’t rest until I had found them all. My only recommendation is to play it on console instead of PC – it’s quite buggy and isn’t worth futzing with the broken DX11 and Games for Windows Live features.

BIT.TRIP.RUNNER (PC)
This is really a rhythm game disguised as a “run forever” game. It’s one of the most unforgiving runners out there – the levels aren’t procedurally generated,  so if you screw up, you end up replaying the same stretches over and over again. It can get frustrating, but not in a terrible way. I intend to go back to it at some point.

Cave Story+ (PC)
This very loosely fits “HD remake”  criteria, but on the flip side, it’s the first opportunity to pay money for one of the best indie games ever made. I played the original Cave Story a while back and this version feels a bit more playable. It’s up there with other classic sidescrollers like Super Metroid and Mega Man in my book. Is there enough to warrant a playthrough if you’ve already played the original? Hard to say.

Child of Eden (Xbox 360 / Kinect)
I appreciated Rez but never loved it. I can’t even appreciate Child of Eden. I thought the gameplay consisted of waving my arms against the backdrop of an acid trip in addition half of the mechanics from Rez.

Civilization V (PC)
OK, I’m embarrassed. This was my first Civilization game. It’s just one of those franchises that, for whatever reason, I never got around to playing for myself. I played this one pretty front-heavy, going about 25 hours in my first week and then never touching it again. The pacing is a bit too slow for my liking but the strategy elements of the game are fantastic. I want to play it multiplayer, but I don’t have a group of friends that will sit and play with me for 12 hours (like Risk).

Deadly Premonition (Xbox 360)
A lot of people said this game was “so bad it’s good” in a B-movie kind of way. I got the bad part, at least.

Dead Space (iOS)
Dead Space’s controls are a pretty impressive blueprint for 3^rd person shooter controls on a touch screen. I transitioned to it after completing Dead Space on the Xbox 360 and I was right at home after a few minutes of experimenting with it. The game’s design leaves a lot to be desired – it’s rather formulaic, and if Doom 3 was faulted for having a lot of monster closets, Dead Space for iOS has monster rooms connected by corridors full of monster closets. Literally every other room in the game will close up with flashing red lights and throw waves of necromorphs at you that must all be defeated before you can continue. Those segments work OK in moderation, but it doesn’t fit the survival horror theme too well.

Dead Space 2 (PlayStation 3)
Dead Space 2 is a perfectly competent sequel. It’s highly polished and upgrades enough mechanics from the original game to feel fresh. It’s not quite the kind of jump I saw between the first two Uncharted games, but that’d be a lot to expect. Visceral made a third person survival horror shooter and beat Capcom at their own game  – when I forget Resident Evil 5 happened and consider Dead Space 1 and 2 to be RE4’s proper sequels, I’m a much happier person. One thing in particular that Dead Space 2 does better than the original is crafting unique atmospheres. A children’s daycare opens up into the silence of deep space. A quiet, eerie church leads into a marketplace where humans are frantically running for their lives. The game’s action sequences and shooting mechanics are good, but they wouldn’t be anywhere near as compelling without the awesome environments to explore. I appreciate their willingness to invest in new environments over new enemy types because enemies aren’t nearly as scary after you’ve figured out how to beat them for the first time.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Xbox 360)
This is a case of a game catering to my preferences so well that I don’t finish it. I’m super deep in sidequests and as a completionist it’s hard to move forward when I risk failing a quest that I can’t go back and do later. I’ll have to pick it up again soon. Maybe.

Dungeon Defenders (PC)
My experience with Dungeon Defenders went something like this: a friend of mine said “GO BUY THIS” and I said “OK” and then I logged in and played a game with his team and 45 seconds later my character gained 16 levels. I had absolutely no idea what was happening. I gave it another chance and started to learn the mechanics for myself, and now I can actually have fun with it. It’s only fun if you play with friends, but if you start off playing with friends, it’s really confusing because the XP system is completely broken.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (Xbox 360)
A lot of people berated this game for being an Uncharted ripoff. Naughty Dog’s recent hire of Enslaved’s design director tells you all you need to know about what they thought of the game. It’s not as good as Uncharted 2 but it’s absolutely worthwhile. From a story perspective, the game is probably stronger. The combat is a lot of fun and the environments are interesting enough to keep my attention. There were a few areas where I felt stuck (puzzles, bosses, etc) and the game didn’t help me along as much as I’d like, but considering it’s for a hardcore audience to begin with, that isn’t a total deal breaker. That lack of extra polish prevents a good game from being great.

The Gunstringer (Xbox 360 / Kinect)
If anyone tells you Kinectimals is the cutest game on Kinect, they haven’t played Gunstringer. The mix of live action and animated puppeteer scenes has a really cool effect. Unfortunately, my elbows started hurting about three levels in because I guess I take the pistol shooting motion a bit too seriously. That’s certainly a disadvantage to lots of motion controls – they punish the player for getting really into the game with arthritis.

Groove Coaster (iPhone)
Finally, a rhythm game for the iPhone that doesn’t suck. The music isn’t great – it’s a lot of j-pop, electronica, and garbled remixes from various Namco and Taito games, but it’s a good deal of fun to tap, hold, and drag along with the beats. I had absolutely no idea how the different ships and power ups worked, and I feel like I missed about half the game as a result, but it’s hard to complain when I got hours of enjoyment out of 99 cents.

Hanging with Friends (iPhone)
I find that hangman has considerably less appeal than Scrabble, so I don’t play this nearly as much as Words with Friends. The in-game items feel like cheating to me, and I feel dirty when I cave in and use them. It maybe takes the F2P model a bit too far for my liking. I still played it regularly for about four months before falling off, so props to Zynga. I just haven’t come back to it like I do Words with Friends.

The Heist (iPhone)
Super polished game with very little substance. The presentation is immaculate – “mission” updates are given to you by simulated phone calls that mimic the iPhone’s normal UI. The actual gameplay is  a compilation of four different games that could probably be found in the free section of the app store, but everything else is so slick that I don’t question my purchase.

The ICO and Shadow of the Colossus Collection (PlayStation 3)
I tried starting ICO again since I never finished it on PS2, but I didn’t finish it on PS3 either. I hopped into Shadow of the Colossus to play around for five minutes and put it down a few hours later. The framerate problems of the original are gone and that’s enough to make it worth another playthrough. It’s also the single-best reason I’ve found to own a 3DTV so far: the sense of scale created by the 3D effect in the overworld is really awesome, and some of the colossi battles feel even more spectacular.

Infamous 2 (PlayStation 3)
I couldn’t get into Infamous 1. I got through about an hour and a half of Infamous 2 before putting it down. I don’t know if it’s the camera, the combat, or what in particular I dislike about the series but it just doesn’t do much for me. I should probably do a decon on it at some point to see if I can figure it out.

Infinity Blade (iPhone)
For all the hype around Infinity Blade, I found the gameplay to be really bland. Sure, it’s pretty, but amazing 3D graphics don’t make a good game. Lots of people really like it, but it seems like a game about grinding to me. I don’t like many MMOs in part of the grinding either, though.

Jetpack Joyride (iPhone)
I picked this up after it went free because the description didn’t excite me – after all, I can only play so many endless running games in a year before I get sick of the formula. Turns out I was just a bit wrong – I’ve invested more time in Jetpack Joyride than any other iOS game this year, with about 14 hours in the month of December alone. The game’s presentation couldn’t be much better and it’s super polished. The addition of temporary vehicles and power ups to the runner formula make it feel new again, almost like a Halo to the last gen’s Goldeneye. Halfbrick is the team to beat when it comes to simple, addictive mobile games, and I’m anxious to see what they do to follow this up.

Killzone 3 (PlayStation 3)
I played Killzone 3 about as long as I played Killzone 2, which is about an hour. Something about the way Guerrilla Games designs their introductions totally turns me off. I’m not terribly interested in the story, all of the characters look/sound the same to me, and the gameplay doesn’t stand out much from its competitors. I have the same problem to a lesser degree with the Resistance series. One of the problems with my experience might have been the insanity of my setup: using the PlayStation Move controller guncon with 3D glasses felt pretty ridiculous.  The production value and AAA-ness of these games can’t be denied and I probably should just accept it’s not my genre.

L.A. Noire (PlayStation 3)
Yet another game I really wanted to like but couldn’t get through. The art and facial animations are as good as everyone says, but the gameplay is nothing short of boring. The detective mode feels like a poor man’s Heavy Rain and the driving has the trademark Rockstar Games DrunkOSteering that make you feel like even the smallest compact is a motherfucking semi. The interrogation scenes are a complete joke – they make the cycles between facial animations super obvious so you can tell when someone is lying. Someone wanted to make a movie but they made a game instead, and an entire studio suffered for it.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii)
This is a game I really wanted to like. Skyward Sword initially looks and feels so much better than its cousins, but it quickly devolved into repetitive fighting with bad motion controls and slow crawling text. It also seems like Nintendo took the internet’s “LOOK, LISTEN” Navi memes and thought it meant we wanted more of it…because there’s a whole lot more of it. The game makes annoying pings and alert tones until you give in and allow it tell you something painfully obvious by way of precanned animations and more slow crawling text. For example, the above moment happens after the name of the new area has been displayed onscreen for about five seconds during an unskippible intro scene. Complete disregard for the player’s intelligence and time is a massive design failure that can’t be forgiven, even if it is part of a sacred franchise. Zelda games are stuck in the past and they need to at least start trying to compete with contemporary adventure games if they want to continue to be relevant.

League of Legends (PC)
I’ve got a decon on the way for League of Legends, but in the meantime, I’ll leave a few thoughts: I had no desire to start playing a DotA game this year, and I ended up investing more time into LoL than anything else. It’s my go-to multiplayer game and I have more friends who play it than anything else. I’ve also invested money into it despite being free to play. It seems Riot accomplished most of their design objectives and I’ll keep playing into 2012.

Little King’s Story (Wii)
A charming non-RTS akin to Pikmin meets Animal Crossing. Little King’s Story offered just the right amount of micromanagement for this genre. It constantly reminds you how Japanese it is, but it never tells you why it’s on Wii – it uses all of the buttons on both the Wiimote and the Nunchuck, but it doesn’t use the cursor or any motion controls whatsoever. It would have been better with a DualShock. Hopefully this will get re-released on PSN or XBLA so it can get a proper audience.

Lost in Shadow (Wii)
Winner of my award in the competitive “most clever use of shadows in a sidescrolling platforming game on the Wii” category, Lost in Shadow is a platforming game that cleverly uses shadows and gives 2.5D some meaning beyond a graphical style. The player controls a shadow and can only walk on shadows, so moving around light sources can completely change a room’s layout even though the foreground may remain the same. The difficulty curve is questionable, but it’s one of the most original titles of 2011 and worth a look if you can come to terms with dusting off your Wii.

Kung-Fu Rider (PlayStation 3)
My experience with Kung-Fu Rider was summarized by the “results” screen after I completed the first level, where the game displays pictures taken with the PS Eye camera intended to show how much fun you’re having. What I saw was my horrified face looking back at me, wondering what the hell I was doing. It hasn’t spent much time in the disc tray since then.

The Maw (PC)
Although I’ve been a pretty big fan of Twisted Pixel’s ‘Splosion Man, I never really got around to playing The Maw until last summer. It feels a little clunky - reminiscent of the middle era N64 platformers – but the cuteness of the characters makes it interesting enough to watch. The core gameplay is derivative of a number of other titles with buddy-buddy concepts, but it’s presented so well that it feels fresh. The puzzle design could have been better and it’s awfully short, but it is just a $10 game. Biggest design takeaway from this one was making memorable characters without using any dialog.

Mafia Wars 2 (PC / Facebook)
I have a bunch of friends at Zynga, and I check out the games they work on as they’re released. Mafia Wars 2 was one of those games. Although it keeps many of the CityVille / FarmVille mechanics, it also marks a significant departure from the standard Zynga compulsion loop. Play sessions last longer before you get blocked by energy requirements, and a variety of quests offer a sense of progression that the other games don’t have. Each individual system feels rather polished, but they aren’t stitched together in an obvious way. Much of the game’s systems can be enjoyed independently – building up your own turf, fighting other players, or completing missions are all valid ways to move forward. To some extent this lets players pick their own play style, but the systems aren’t compelling enough on their own for long.

Some of my contributions to the MPG Minecraft server.

Minecraft (PC)
Minecraft is a game about building things with blocks that destroys lives and ruins relationships. Check it out.

Ms. Splosion’ Man (Xbox 360)
Ms. ‘Splosion Man had the best opening of any game in 2011. I kept playing until I quit laughing, which wasn’t until about three hours in. I found it to be a lot tougher than its male counterpart from 2009, but It’s still a blast. Oh, dammit.

Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath (PC)
I missed out on the Oddworld games when they were released, so I picked up the Oddbox on Steam to check ‘em out. Stranger’s Wrath was a pleasant surprise. I’ve seen it described as a love-it-or-hate-it kind of game, in part because it’s different from the other Oddworld games and in part because the controls are so different from any other game. It successfully employs a first AND third person camera, and requires the player to constantly switch between them. There’s a definite learning curve but it’s also proof that such a system can work. The weapons are super inventive too. Every part of this game was somewhat memorable, but perhaps that was because it was my first Oddworld experience.

Outland (Xbox 360)
I really wanted to love Outland. It’s the bastard child of Ikaruga and Prince of Persia stuffed into a Metroidvania game. The art style is absolutely beautiful, but the game stalls after the first hour and a half or so. The puzzles go from being clever to being unnecessarily difficult, and it begins to feel like the developers ran out of mechanics. I might go back and finish this one eventually, but I’m only willing to invest a certain amount of effort into difficult platforming sections when platforming isn’t your game’s primary focus.

Orcs Must Die (PC)
It’s rare to see a tower defense game with so much character in any given year, but 2011 gave us two. Orcs Must Die is essentially a single-player only Dungeon Defenders with better animations, more imaginative towers, and a lot more levels. Although it’s hard to play one without comparing it to the other, I found both games to merit a playthrough on their own.

PAYDAY: The Heist (PC)
PAYDAY felt like Left 4 Dead without a soul. Maybe I’m getting a bit soft, but replacing zombies with cops bothers me when I can recognize the formula as something that usually has zombies. Some of the levels were well-designed, but most of the mechanics they introduce to the formula are ho-hum at best. Something feels arbitrary about the design when your equipment jamming is more dangerous than a SWAT team spraying you with fire.

PlayStation Move Heroes (PlayStation 3)
Where on earth did this come from? A game featuring the protagonists from all the best Sony platformers seems like a win on paper, but Heroes is doomed from the start with an unnecessarily complicated control scheme. It’s essentially a mini-game collection with a loose story that stitches together the different events…but even as a mini game collection, it doesn’t stand up to Sports Champions on its own platform.

Portal 2 (PC)
Some people said the single player campaign was too short. I think it might’ve been a little too long. The co-op was just right. Not much to say here because if you’re taking the time to read a developer’s blog, you’ve probably already played it. If not, why are you wasting your time reading this?? Portal 2 is one of those games that everyone should play.

Rayman Origins (Xbox 360)
This game could also be sold as “joy on a disc.” In fact, it might have sold better that way. It’s a quirky niche title – like most Michel Ancel games – and it’s an absolute blast for anyone who isn’t scared about the prospect of a 2D platformer being released as a full price retail game. The inventive level design is surpassed only by the hand-drawn art style. I wish it had online co-op so I could actually finish a co-op session of the main game, but that isn’t a reason to skip out on one of 2011′s best titles. I’m thrilled to see Ubisoft taking risks like this as a developer and publisher, and I’m deeply saddened it wasn’t financially successful.

Revenge of the Titans (PC)
Cute tower defense game with a pseudo retro style. Another Humble Bundle pickup, another game devoid of innovation but full of polish and hours of fun that justify owning it.

The Sly Collection (PlayStation 3)
I missed out on the Sly Cooper games back on the PS2, but as a fan of platformers and stealth games, I picked up the collection shortly after it came out. I was surprised that the game is rather unforgiving in earlier levels, given its kid-friendly appearance. But as someone who develops kid-friendly games, I appreciated the amount of depth in the gameplay. It’s every bit as good as the Jak and Daxter games, but perhaps not as good as Ratchet & Clank.

Sonic CD (iPhone / Xbox 360)
As a longtime Sonic fan, I picked up this “port” on both platforms. I hesitate to call it a port since it was a complete rewrite with a new engine, but hey – the backstory behind its development is almost as enjoyable as the game itself. It controls surprisingly well on a touchscreen, but when I played to get all the achievements and a full completion I used my Xbox controller. I’d love to see more classic games revitalized in this style.

Sonic Colors (Wii)
For those not in the know, I used to be a huge Sonic fan. I ran a pretty big Sonic website back when I was in middle school but couldn’t stay interested after Sega released a series of absolutely terrible games after the turn of the millennium. Every time the media says “this game is a return to Sonic’s roots,” I’m tempted to check it out, and Sonic Colors eventually became too tempting to pass up. It’s not bad. It’s better than any other 3D Sonic game before it, but it’s not without its annoyances. The 2D sections are well thought out and the new power ups actually add something to the experience. The 3D behind-the-back sections are still problematic thanks to the use of the Wii Remote’s d-pad, but it works a bit better with a retro controller. Games should not use digital input for 3D movement. It doesn’t work – I thought we figured this out back on the PS1, but apparently some people at Sonic Team have forgotten. Still, I think most games would be entertained enough by Colors to make it worth grabbing from a bargain bin.

Sonic Generations (PlayStation 3)
If Sonic Colors is “OK,” then Sonic Generations is “good.” It still has some flaws with “death by camera” and other silly issues that have plagued the series for years, but Sega essentially made two good games here instead of one great one. Parts of the game’s design seems kind of dangerous on paper – it alternates levels that use two different control schemes with the same character – but the presentation is slick enough to make it flow somewhat seamlessly. I picked it up and launch and have no regrets – it’s probably not as enjoyable if you don’t have the nostalgia factor for all the old levels, but it’s still a very solid effort and I’d be perfectly happy to buy more Sonic games with these controls.

Sports Champions (PlayStation 3)
Sports Champions might’ve been a good game if it was possible to play it without comparing it to Kinect Sports. As it stands, it feels rushed and kind of empty. Only a handful of the games are worth playing more than once. Bocce ball is fantastic, frisbee golf is pretty good, and I could see myself maybe playing ping pong again, but aside from that, it seems more focused on showing how the Move controller is different from the Wii Remote than it does being a good game. Whereas you have stadiums full of colorful characters cheering for you in Wii Sports and Kinect Sports, Sports Champions’ levels take place in empty outdoors environments where you hear nothing but birds chirping and the occasional wind gust. Could be great for an exercise game, but for a party game, I tend to want a little more excitement.

Terraria (PC)
It’s 2D Minecraft! It’s 2D Minecra–oh, wait, it’s actually more than that. Terraria is like Minecraft meets Castlevania, with a bigger focus on exploration and combat than building. In fact, I almost completely ignored the building in Terraria despite exclusively building in Minecraft. Shows what just a few design differences can do to differentiate a game from the ones that inspire it.

Tiny Tower (iPhone)
This was the only social game I played for more than a few days this year. I kept up with Tiny Tower for about a month. The visual assertion of growth found in building a vertical tower  was highly satisfying – I always felt like I knew exactly what my goal was and how I could achieve it – and the micromanagement of each resident was also a welcome change from other games that replace that kind of depth with an opportunity to make you invite real world friends. Tiny Tower stands a strong iPhone title regardless of whether or not you put money into it and doesn’t feel like a cash grab nearly as much as some of its competitors.

Tiny Wings (iPhone)
This game was my go-to time waster on iOS for the first half of the year. It’s also a really cool indie success story – one guy makes a game alone and it skyrockets to the top of the appstore, making him set for life. The art is nauseatingly cute, the music is catchy, and the gameplay is tight. You can’t ask for much more in a 99 cent game.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (PS3)
Since moving to LA, I’ve made a bunch of friends at Naughty Dog and I saw firsthand the sweat and tears that went into making Uncharted 3. It’s an absolutely beautiful game and offers thrills from start to finish. I think they went overboard in a few areas – I often feel like Drake is drunk when controlling him in crowded areas, where he puts his hands on everything in sight – but if you’re looking for an immersive, cinematic experience, you can’t do better than Uncharted. It’s much more of a playable movie than something like Heavy Rain and has amazing technical merits to go along with it.  The gunplay is fun, the puzzles are well-designed, and, as with its predecessor, the multiplayer is surprisingly deep. Like the summer blockbusters it mimics, it lags a little bit towards the end, but finishes with a bang and leaves you with a smile on your face.

Vanquish (Xbox 360)
I played about three hours into Vanquish on its “hard” difficulty and had little trouble until hitting a particularly tricky boss. After about 20 tries, I reluctantly lowered my difficulty level to “medium” – forfeiting my achievements for the playthrough – and tried again. It didn’t seem any easier. I lowered to “easy” and still couldn’t beat it. Hitting a brick wall like that is just about the worst thing I can experience in a game, which is a shame because Vanquish was a lot of fun up until that point. The game is super polished but it’s hard to go back to when I put it down at such a low point.

VVVVVV (PC)
This indie darling was clever, and had some tough-as-nails puzzles, but like Super Meat Boy I fail to see the appeal for more than a few minutes. Maybe that’s why it’s $5? I have a lot of respect for the dev, but I’m not terribly excited about these kind of games because they pass “crazy difficulty” off as “good design.” Yes, the game is designed reasonably well, but the best design is found in games that take complicated puzzles and make them accessible (read: Portal, World of Goo).

World of Goo (iPhone)
Like Plants vs. Zombies, I find new ways to buy World of Goo every time it comes out on a different platform. I’ve actually bought this one twice – the SD version on my 3GS and the HD version on my new 4S. It’s already a classic as far as I’m concerned, and I go back to it whenever I want to relive a lesson in the joy of simplicity. And it’s only $0.99!

]]> http://holdenlink.com/2012/01/what-i-played-2011-edition/feed/ 1 http://holdenlink.com/2011/12/why-i-cant-finish-skyward-sword/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-i-cant-finish-skyward-sword http://holdenlink.com/2011/12/why-i-cant-finish-skyward-sword/#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:51:29 +0000 Holden http://holdenlink.com/?p=966 Skyward Sword’s biggest fans and many members of the press believe that the motion controls make the game what it is – you have to put extra thought into every sword swipe and the 1:1 connection makes it feel more personal than any Zelda game before it. I have a very different opinion. I really wanted to like it, but Skyward Sword will be the first Zelda game I don’t finish. Here’s my attempt to articulate my problems with the game.

Good implementations of motion controls make you feel more connected to the activity you’re doing through a series of smoke and mirrors. Dance Central, for instance, is really just a game of Simon Says that makes you feel awesome. You see the dancers on stage doing crazy routines, and when the game says you did well, you think you look as cool as the dancers. In reality, the game was just looking at an approximation of your movements, and if you were close, it’ll give you positive feedback. Anyone who has played Dance Central in a party setting knows that the game usually tells people they look better than they actually do. That’s part of the fun, though, and it isn’t a bad design. It is distinctly different from other dancing games before it and shows the promise of its platform.

Wii Sports before it was even a well-designed game. Even if it was mostly waggle, it enabled players to mimic real bowling or boxing motions and get better results than they would in real life. They weren’t accurate, but they offered a very different experience compared to everything in the genre before it.

Guitar Hero didn’t make its name with motion controllers, but still achieved success by offering a new way to play music games that allowed players to feel like they were living out a fantasy.

All of these games had their critics. Some professional musicians hated Guitar Hero. I recall Pearl Jam’s singer performing one of his songs in Rock Band on a talk show and getting a failing grade. Some people felt like it trivialized learning an actual instrument, while others embraced it as a fun alternative. Wii Sports is slammed by people who really do play tennis, golf, and baseball all the time as being a completely inaccurate simulation. Even Dance Central is criticized by really good dancers – it requires you to follow a really rigid set of movements if you’re going to get the best scores on harder difficulties, but being rigid makes you look like an idiot if you’re actually dancing. People who have precedents for an experience judge motion controls that attempt to recreate those experiences by those precedents.

Skyward Sword has a precedent – every Zelda game before it – so when motion controls make it harder for me to kill enemies that I’ve encountered throughout Zelda games my entire life, I’m going to react negatively. I’ve heard that “every enemy is like a puzzle” – well, yes, it certainly is. It’s a puzzle to figure out how to make the controller do what you want it to do so that you can get on to the actual puzzles in the dungeons. I’ve managed to beat two of the dungeons and a couple sidequests, and the hardest enemy I’ve faced so far is the Skulltula – the spiders that I’ve been fighting with lock-on controls since Ocarina of Time. In Skyward Sword, you have to perform a stabbing motion to damage them after performing a side-to-side slash to flip them around. The chances of getting two actions with the motion controls correct in sequence are slim to none for me, and I’ve invested 5-6 hours in the game.

Skyward Sword isn’t the first game on the Wii to feature these controls. Red Steel 2 used Wii MotionPlus to track 1:1 sword motions, and while it was praised as being kind of cool, it was frustrating after ten minutes there too.

But perhaps the bigger failure is what they sacrificed to bring us these broken controls – in a game that rewards precise aim over all else, your control over the camera is limited to centering it behind your character. Lining up certain shots takes three or four tries. When using something like the bomb flowers – which have been around forever – you’re given a time penalty on top of horrible aim. This wouldn’t be anywhere near as much of a problem if the Wii Remote wasn’t always reserved for the sword’s alignment – it’s a reasonably precise aiming tool and can certainly compensate for another analog stick if it needs to.

The big praise for Skyward Sword’s motion controls is that they “aren’t waggle” and add a lot of depth to the game. I’d argue that they are waggle. They don’t let me do anything I haven’t already done in other Zelda games, and they make it more complicated. Enemies that require you to hit them in certain ways are nothing new – Zelda’s been doing it for years. This is just a poorly designed way of interacting with those enemies. Plenty of good designs for these systems exist: Dead Space did it for survival horror with the dismemberment system, for example. The Zelda DS game introduced stylus control which drastically changed the way you played the game, but played to the strengths of the platform and made interacting with enemies feel intuitive. Skyward Sword’s controls, in contrast, highlight all of the problems with motion controls. They don’t always do what you expect because you have less tangible control with motion than you do digital button presses – particularly with 1:1 motion, where it’s harder for the game to “help” you get the result you want. Games that succeed with motion controls do not penalize you for that disconnect, and Skyward Sword does.

I picked it up with low expectations, and came away 60 hours later thoroughly impressed. Players willing to look beyond the problems can still find a satisfying experience inside – not to say they should because it has a lot of problems, but it shouldn’t be completely dismissed either. It’s a good candidate for a deconstruction because the unpolished mechanics strewn throughout the game are representative of amazing ideas that remain unexplored by other open world games.

The Saboteur

Developer: Pandemic Studios
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Genre: Open World / Stealth Action
Metacritic: 72
Price: $59.99 on release, $19.99 at the time of writing

The bulk of Saboteur’s gameplay consists of destroying targets that weaken the Nazi presence in the city such as observation towers, armored vehicles, and artillery encampments. The sheer number of targets around the city is unprecedented – looking at a map of them at the beginning is nothing short of intimidating. Some players might be turned off by the breadth of things to do, but it reinforces the setting by making the French Resistance feel smaller than any sort of dialog could.

Story missions are strewn throughout the game and do everything you’d expect in an open world game. They’ll take place in one-off, linear levels, but most of the time they’re just about navigating from point A to point B on the world map, occasionally blowing something up along the way. There’s nothing particularly bad about this system, but nothing great either.

The defining characteristic of Saboteur is its stealth gameplay. Players are tasked with sneaking into bases and planting bombs over and over again. It’s a big system, so let’s break it down:

The game’s map is divided into three types of areas: “normal zones,” “suspicion zones,” and “restricted zones.” In normal zones, Sean can walk around right in front of Nazi officers without them minding. These are the areas where the people of Paris are out on the streets. In suspicion zones (indicated by yellow on the map), enemies will slowly become suspicious when they see Sean. In restricted zones (indicated by red on the map), enemies will almost instantly trigger an alert when they see Sean.

Alerts follow the GTA system of escaping the highlighted area on the minimap. The area’s size doubles with each alert level. After alert level three (of five), “fight back” points appear on the map that act as a sort of last-stand where NPCs assist the player at an intersection to fend off Nazis from all sides. After eliminating enough enemies, the alert phase ends. There are also hiding spots throughout the city that can be used to end the lower alert levels, such as brothels and bathrooms.

The player’s suspicion level is indicated by a yellow ring around the player’s weapon on the UI. It drops at a constant rate, but increases at different rates depending on the player’s actions. Climbing a building or walking into a Nazi is always suspicious, and driving over one will instantly trigger an alert. Running while in a suspicion zone will cause the meter to increase much faster than walking. Enemies that see the player doing suspicious things are outlined in yellow so the player knows where suspicion increase is coming from.

The player can also use stealth kills on Nazis to steal their uniforms, allowing free exploration of suspicion zones. Climbing and running, however, are still suspicious, and the player can’t get too close to enemies for an extended period of time. Disguises disappear whenever an alert is triggered, and they aren’t an inventory item.

Lots of critics complained that the stealth system felt too “gamey.” I’m not entirely sure I understand the concept of a game being too much of a game, but to be fair, let’s look Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell, widely accepted as the best modern stealth-action franchises, to get an idea of what a “good” stealth system looks like.

When enemies spot the player in Metal Gear Solid, they audibly say something like “HUH? WHAT WAS THAT?” and begin walking in the player’s direction. Various factors affect how fast the player is spotted, such as light versus dark hiding places or crawling versus standing. Making noise is bad too – unless the player uses a silenced weapon, enemies will hear gunshots. After a couple seconds of being visible, the famous exclamation point appears above the enemies’ heads and they begin shooting, triggering an “alert” phase where all enemies in the area will start moving in the player’s direction. If players just run through a room full of guards, they’re almost certain to be seen. There also aren’t any safe areas – guards will always attack them when they see them. Players are equally rewarded for stealth kills and shooting wildly, but most players choose to play it as a stealth game because most of the mechanics are designed for stealth.

Splinter Cell has similar light/dark and noise mechanics, but rewards stealth over action. It’s possible (and often encouraged) to proceed through large sections of the game without killing anyone.

In both games, players must run away, hide, and wait a certain period of time after being spotted. During this waiting period (often called the “suspicion period”), the game’s enemies will actively search the level until they either find the player (retriggering the alert phase) or the timer on the waiting period runs out. After that, they go back about their business as usual.

Whereas it can be frustrating to sit in the same place waiting for an alert to end in Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell, Saboteur empowers players by making them responsible for ending an alert rather than being the mercy of the AI’s pathfinding. This doesn’t mean that the systems in Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid are poorly designed: they serve to encourage players to use stealth. If I know I’m going to have to sit still for sixty seconds every time an enemy sees me, I’m going to make damn sure I don’t get seen. You simply cannot offer a good run-n-gun experience when half the buttons on your control scheme are reserved for stealth-related actions, so it makes sense to encourage players to use stealth most of the time.

This is a problem for The Saboteur. The game is forgiving enough that it allows players to play it like a shooter rather than a stealth game. Regardless of the difficulty level, you can shoot your way through almost any situation if you don’t want to use stealth, and it’s always the easier option. The run-away-reset system isn’t bad on its own, and it’s been proven to work in an open-world environment, but the game offers nothing to reward you for using stealth beyond a handful of achievements. Players are going to go for goals whenever they see them, and if the easiest way is to shoot their way to a target, that’s the route they’ll take most of the time.

When played as a run-n-gun, the reset system has the opposite of its intended effect: players now must take a break from their shooting to run away from the action and reset the alert meter so they can deal with a manageable number of enemies in the area. It becomes a game of inching forward and resetting rather than a game of continuous progress.

Maybe this is what the critics who cried “gamey” really meant. The stealth system would likely come across as being overly arbitrary when players breeze through Saboteur like an action game. Maybe we inherently expect a penalty for being discovered when we’re sneaking around through some basic understanding of “stealth” beyond traditional game mechanics. Saboteur’s systems aren’t all that different from the games that critics love, but they were perceived as being poorly implemented. That means the problem lies with balancing in the other mechanics that present the stealth system, such as player health and firepower.

If the majority of your game’s design is geared towards stealth, it should almost always encourage players to choose stealth as their first option for any given situation.

Some people love the run-n-gun gameplay popularized in GTA and Mercenaries, so it’s likely Pandemic (or EA) management that wanted the studio to stay somewhat true to its roots. I see this as a missed opportunity for Pandemic to separate itself from the competition – if the bigger part of the game required players to use stealth and plant bombs, it might have ended up appealing to the Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid audience. As it was implemented, it fell into the crowded GTA wannabe genre and went unnoticed in the holiday-release window.

It might sound like I’m talking about Assassin’s Creed now. The games have a lot of similarities – most notably in their climbing / parkour systems – but they feel very different. Assassin’s Creed is much more structured. I recently played through Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, an absolutely fantastic game by all accounts, and the story missions blow Saboteur out of the water in terms of production value, plot, and gameplay variety. The bulk of Saboteur’s gameplay, however, lies in its freeplay missions (or sidequests / collect-a-thon compulsions). Whereas Assassin’s Creed has you running after flags and feathers on rooftops, Saboteur has you blowing shit up. I found the latter to be more satisfying. To top it off, there are more sabotage targets in Saboteur than there are flags in the first three Assassin’s Creed games combined (which you should know is a lot of targets if you’ve played an Assassin’s Creed game).

To continue the comparison, the climbing mechanics in Saboteur feel much slower than in Assassin’s Creed, and a lot of critics complained about that too. Assassin’s Creed does the work for you – hold the free run button and approach a climbable object to climb up. In Saboteur, you run up to an object, press the jump button, then press the grab button, and move the joystick around to select the next ledge you want to jump to. You then press the jump button and repeat for every subsequent ledge until you reach the top. It’s a lot more work and it doesn’t feel anywhere near as elegant as Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia or Uncharted.

I see this difference as being similar to the Metal Gear Solid / Splinter Cell alert-reset waiting period problem. Assassin’s Creed is much more fast-paced than Saboteur, so a fast climbing system makes sense for players who just want to get from mission to mission. In Saboteur, climbing up certain buildings are often missions in themselves for knocking out freeplay targets. The player has to think more, and in turn, prepare a strategy before attempting to scale it. Maybe it doesn’t feel as cool as Assassin’s Creed, but it isn’t necessarily a bad design. I think there’s room for both systems to work. In fact, I would argue that if Saboteur had put more of a focus on stealth (if even by lowering the player’s health), players would have been more open to the climbing system. It can feel more rewarding when the player does actual work to reach a goal. Unfortunately, the slow pace feels really out of place when the game is played as a run-n-gun, and that seems to be how most people played it.

The gameplay as a whole suffers from Steve Jobs syndrome: if you think it’s bad, you’re probably holding it wrong. That’s not the consumer’s fault – there’s no wrong way to hold a great game – but as curious developers, we should at least be able to impose artificial constraints on the way we play a game to have the best possible experience and learn from it.

Closing

At the end of the day, I want a stealth-action game to make me feel like a badass. Show me another game where I can climb up into an enemy watchtower, hop on an anti-air turret, shoot a zeppelin out of the sky, set a bomb, and make my escape before watching an oppressed people celebrate when they see the explosion. That was the vision of Saboteur, and you can still experience it if you give the game a try. It’s a prime example of good game design that could have been great, and it’s a real shame that Pandemic didn’t get extra time to figure those problems out.

The economy sucks. Companies say they aren’t hiring. There are a ton of job search tools out there, but none of them seem to help. Sometimes we don’t even get automated responses to our applications, much less any feedback from an actual person. Yet somehow, some people are still getting jobs straight out of school.

I’m one of the lucky few, and now that I know where I’m going, I’ve had time to reflect on how I got here. There’s no clear-cut path to getting in, but there are plenty of things you can do to improve your chances – hopefully my experience will help somebody else.

Create an Online Portfolio

Way too many people wait until just before they graduate to make a portfolio and toss it online. You should do this as soon as you start college and add to it every semester. Add class projects. Blog about your experiences. It’ll make networking easier down the road.

Shell out the ten bucks a year for a real domain name. It looks a lot more professional and it’s easier for people to find. If you can get your domain to match your name, it’ll also raise your Google karma. If you’re a programmer, producer, or designer, it’s completely fine to use a prebuilt theme for a content management system like WordPress. If you’re an artist, you can still use something like WordPress, but you should think about customizing it to show off your skills.

Use your website as your opportunity to craft an experience that displays exactly what you want people to know about you.

Network Early

A lot of students seem to think that networking is the hardest part of the job search process. You don’t start off by knowing the the CEO of a major game company or someone who has the ability to directly land you a job. It’d be nice, sure, but it isn’t realistic.

Start off by getting to know your fellow students. They’re a fantastic foundation for networking. I made a game with someone on my dorm hall during my sophomore year, and he landed an internship. When I applied to the same company, I had the reputation of being “the guy who worked with the other guy,” and that went a long way in helping me get my first interview. It made me memorable to the recruiter because I associated me with someone who the company already knew to be qualified.

If you get to know a lot of your fellow students in your first and second years of college, you’ll end up “knowing people who know people” by your junior and senior years.

Make Something

Be the person who instills everyone with a drive to do something. Find a group that you really liked working on a project with in a class? See if they want to continue the project after the class is over. Find other people who want to make games. Start small, set a goal, and try to reach it. Maybe you just make a Flash game with a couple friends over a weekend. Don’t know how to make a Flash game? Find someone who does or find other people who want to learn how. Not interested in making a full game? Try making a mod.

A lack of programming skill isn’t an excuse to not make something. I’m a terrible programmer, but I still “made” an XNA game and released it on Xbox Live Indie Games in my second year of college. I worked with two student programmers and compensated for my lack of programming skill by being a designer, music composer, and artist. I wasn’t great at any of those tasks because I didn’t have any prior experience, but I was great at getting the programmers excited about making the game. That’s really all that matters for your first project.

If you wait to make a game until you have to make one for a class, you’re probably starting too late. I’ve heard a lot of students say they don’t have time to develop a game outside of class. I can assure you: you have time, you just have to be disciplined. If one guy can develop one game a day for 219 days straight, you can find the time to make one game over the course of a semester. Set deadlines and milestones if you have to. Use the IGF or Indiecade deadlines as a goal for getting something accomplished. If you really enjoy developing games, it shouldn’t a problem. If you’re worried your grades will suffer…well, you’re probably right. I wasn’t smart enough to do well in classes without studying for hours on end, so I chose to let my grades drop so I could make games. It worked out well for me and everyone else I know who did the same. Obviously you don’t want to flunk out of school, but you’ll learn to prioritize.

There are a few ways to do this wrong: don’t be the programmer who thinks they can do everything on their own. Occasionally you can, but you’ll be a much more attractive candidate for that first internship if you can show that you’ve worked on a team. Don’t be the designer who just has this great idea that will totally work and be successful if people would just make it. The reality is that programmers and artists, the people who make your ideas come to life, have ideas of their own – and often they’ll be better than yours. Real designers spend more time listening to feedback and refining ideas from their peers than they do designing things on their own.

Finish Something

Recruiter: “I see on your resume that you worked on a game called Project X.”
Student: “Yeah…I was making that for a while but I felt like I could do something better so I moved on and now I’m working on Project Y.”
Recruiter: “Oh, ok. That’s cool.”
Student: “Yeah. It will be.”
Recruiter: “OK.”
Student: “Yeah.”

This is where most students fall off track – they have a resume with tons of projects they’ve worked on, but nothing they’ve truly “finished.” Finishing one project and releasing it to the public is much more impressive to a recruiter than working ten times as long on four or five unfinished projects. It means you’ve successfully gone through an entire development cycle. You’ve started with an idea, executed it, and seen how consumers reacted to it. Starting a project is the easy part – it’s fun and exciting. Making all the content, fixing the bugs, and polishing the experience is the part that sucks the life out of you. It’s repetitive and often frustrating. But you’ll also feel much more accomplished when it’s actually finished.

Releasing a game can be as simple as uploading something to your personal website or Kongregate. Platforms like Facebook, iOS, Android, and XNA make independent distribution easier than ever, and as a result, it’s becoming more and more of a requirement for getting a job out of school. You know all those “entry level” job postings that say “minimum 1-2 shipped titles?” These count!

Feedback on your first game will probably be brutal. That’s OK. It doesn’t need to be good. In fact, it’s almost better for it to be bad. You’ll learn a lot more by having people tell you why your game sucks. Some people have the opposite problem – they’re afraid to finish a game because they know it isn’t perfect. The truth is that your game will never be perfect, and it’s OK. Games can be fun even if they aren’t perfect. If it isn’t fun, wrap it up and release it anyways – get feedback from players and figure out why it wasn’t fun, then fix it or move on. There’s a lot to be said for playtesting and polishing the user experience, but for your first project, being good isn’t as important as being shipped. You’ll learn from your mistakes and do things better the next time around.

Know What’s Happening

Do you want to make the next Guitar Hero? That’s great, but unfortunately no one wants to buy the next Guitar Hero. Be aware of industry trends – you need to know what games are popular and what games are failing, not just which ones are good and bad. Read a little bit of gaming news daily, if only for 15 or 20 minutes. Don’t just read one site, either: use something like GameTab so you can see which stories are popping up on multiple sites. That’ll tell you what the industry as a whole is buzzing about. Check out VGChartz every couple weeks to see what the best-selling games are. Read news sites like Gamasutra that are more business-oriented. As you start looking for a job, it’ll be really valuable to know that the company you want to work for just had a ton of layoffs or a company you hadn’t previously considered is opening up a new studio down the road.

Play Lots of Games

This is really important for designers and producers. There’s a big difference between playing games a lot and playing lots of games. Don’t play the same game for 100 hours. You might really like Call of Duty, but playing it past the five or six hour mark isn’t going to do a lot to make you a better game developer. If you only play games you enjoy, you won’t know “what not to do” when you’re making something new. This doesn’t mean you need to spend more time playing games – you can play ten different games for five hours a week instead of playing Team Fortress 2 or Minecraft for an hour a day. If you find a game you like and you want to play it longer, go ahead! Have fun, but learn to recognize when you reach the point where you’re no longer getting anything out of a game.

Playing a lot of games isn’t that expensive if you do it right. If you want to buy games used, go ahead, but even better than that for your budget is buying “new” games a few months after they come out. You can get just about any game for half of its retail price if you’re willing to wait. CheapAssGamer is an awesome community for finding deals as they happen. Goozex is a huge step up from GameStop if you want to go the used game route. GameFly is also a great alternative if keeping a physical library isn’t important to you.

Do you only buy games for PlayStation and think the Wii and Xbox are the embodiment of all evil? Tough. Get over it. Play games on every console. There is no single platform that gets all of the best games, and few employers are interested in hiring someone who only wants to make one kind of game for one platform. It’s OK to enjoy obscure JRPGs or play a lot of FPSes, but make sure you play the occasional platformer or random indie game too. I’ve been asked what kind of games I play in every interview. Being able to say “just about all kinds” and list three or four very different games is a good thing if you can do it honestly. It shows that you have a comprehensive knowledge of game conventions and that you’ll be able to pull from your mental library for just about any design or implementation problem.

You should also begin linking games and franchises to different developers and publishers so you can recall who does what in the industry. It’ll make networking with people a lot easier if you’ve heard of or played the games they’ve worked on, and it’ll help you recognize studios when they have job openings. It’s not as hard as it sounds, particularly if you keep up with industry news.

Go to GDC

Attending the Game Developers Conference is the best networking experience a student can get. Yes, it’s expensive. You’re already paying to go to school, though, and this will help you a lot more than any of your classes.

Start off by applying for the GDC volunteer program and the IGDA scholarship. If you don’t get in, it’s OK – you can still find a way to make it work.

Before you go to the conference, do the following:

• Make business cards with your name, field, phone number, and website. Print them yourself if you’d like – you shouldn’t need very many.
• Print a dozen or so copies of your resume. Most companies at the expo won’t accept paper resumes anymore, but it’s good to have them just in case.
• Research the companies you’re interested in working for that will be at the conference, and figure out why you want to work for them. Companies are not impressed with people who go around to every booth to see who is hiring. If they have to tell you about what their company does or what games they make, that’s not a good start. The GDC website offers a list of all the companies in attendance a few weeks before the conference every year.

If it’s your first time going, get an Expo Pass. Enjoy the sights and sounds, schmooze around the career pavilion, and have fun. Most importantly, do your research and find out where the parties are. The worst-kept secret of GDC is that the best networking happens outside of the conference halls. You’ll never find a better atmosphere for meeting people. Most people really like to talk about themselves, and a party with an open bar is a great environment for starting a conversation. Exchange cards with everyone you talk to – you probably won’t remember names the next day.

Your chances of landing an internship or job while at GDC are actually quite slim. Most companies at the career pavilion will tell you to submit your resume online and wait for a response. That hardly means the career pavilion is useless – use it as an opportunity to make yourself memorable to the recruiters and follow their instructions. Ask if there’s anyone in your discipline around from their company that you can talk to and learn more about their studio culture. Get their business cards so you can email them directly to stay in touch and reiterate your interest.

When you get home the week after GDC, pull out that stack of business cards and find out who you just met – use Google, MobyGames, or anything else you want. It’s OK to tell someone that you looked them up and found out they worked on your favorite Genesis game back in the day – in fact, it’s a great icebreaker. As a student in particular, you’re in a great position to ask for feedback on your personal projects. How cool is it to be able to say that you had a designer from a big studio playtest your game and offer ideas? You aren’t wasting their time by asking, and you’ll be surprised at how willing most people in the industry will be to help you out.

Never Stop Networking

Networking is more than meeting people – it’s about learning how to stay in touch. Facebook and Twitter are particularly helpful with this because they do a lot of the work for you, but don’t be afraid to send the occasional email. Again, this is a young, casual industry, and it’s completely acceptable to email someone who has the job you want with a question or favor to ask. You’ll probably find them asking you questions from time to time too.

Too many students wait for internship or job opportunities to hit them in the face - a flyer on campus advertising a company visit, a professor sharing a job opportunity with a class over email, etc. Take those opportunities when they come, but also reach out to companies on your own. Do you have a classmate or a friend who did an internship with a company you’d want to work for? Ask for an introduction. Don’t be afraid to email people. Worst case scenario is that you won’t get a response. Start this process early on – preferably as soon as you have a portfolio that you feel comfortable showing. Your school might have some sort of online system for finding jobs, and it might help, but be aware that you can bypass it and talk to directly to employers if it makes you more comfortable.

Closing

If you’ve done most of these things, you should be well ahead of the pack for getting that elusive internship or job offer. There’s no 100% guaranteed way to get your foot in the door, but I can say with confidence that the methods above can only do you good. Never stop networking or making things. Keep trying and you’ll land on your feet.

If you have anything to add to this article, please let me know! If you disagree with something, let me know that too!

Update: Fellow Tech student Dan Spaventa offers some complementary advice on things that many people take for granted:

“Be Passionate.” A big mistake I made early on and I see a lot of people make is talking/writing to people too mechanically. It’s important to get across just how serious and passionate you are about making games and your general love of game development …and you can’t necessarily do that if you are writing a generic John Deer letter to whoever it is you are trying to express interest to. Keep some level of professionalism in the letter or conversation, but never try to talk as someone you think they would hire rather than yourself who you are going to convince them to hire.

“Be confident.” Not everything you make is going to be the greatest game ever, or will come out exactly how you expect it. Be proud of your failures and be able to learn from them rather than feel sorry for yourself or push them under the rug never to talk about them again. If you don’t think you are good at what you do, how do you expect people in the industry to think so? I know when I went into my second interview I had the crazy eye. I wanted that job more than anything and I made it clear that I wanted it and was best suited for it by being passionate and confident about everything I had said.

“Be realistic.” Shoot for that dream job at game company X, but don’t be afraid to start out small and build experience at another company so that you may actually be an ideal candidate later down the road. Don’t just apply to blockbuster AAA companies and expect to nail a job as content designer or something ridiculously out of reach for an entry level designer. Still shoot for those positions, but also look to smaller companies and projects like Mom and Pop’s iPhone game development company.

Update (2): Lots of great feedback coming in. Former Pandemic / EALA software engineer Neil Mehta adds:

I want to echo one of Dan’s points: be passionate. When I interviewed people at EA and Pandemic, I was looking for 3 things: fit, communication skills and technical skills (in that order). Considering that there will be some weeks where I’m spending more time with you than with my girlfriend (weekends included), you’d better be worth it.

Resources

Here are a few links I may have mentioned in the article above along with some others that are generally helpful to have. If you think I’m missing something, please add suggestions in the comments.

Game Creation Tools

• Unity - http://unity3d.com/
  Unity is a widely-used 3D game engine that offers a free version for students and hobbyists. There are also a ton of great tutorials available for it, along with a busy forum community with a reputation for being kind to newbies.
• App Hub / XNA Game Studio - http://create.msdn.com/en-US/
  XNA is Microsoft’s free development platform for Xbox Live Indie Games and Windows Phone 7. They have some great resources for helping you get started too. Microsoft also offers free XNA subscriptions (needed to test / publish games on the Xbox) through MSDNAA (if you school offers it) or DreamSpark. And even if you don’t qualify for the free subscription, the annual free is under $150.
• Flixel – http://flixel.org/
  Popularized after the release of indie-darling Canabalt, Flixel is a great framework for Flash if you’re looking to create a 2D sidescroller. It has a very active community and offers compatibility with lots of existing tech. You also don’t need the expensive Flash suite to develop with it!

Indie Game Contests (Student-Friendly)

• Global Game Jam – http://globalgamejam.org/
  If you do one thing on this list, do the Global Game Jam. It only takes 48 hours of your life and you’ll (likely) have a playable game to show for it.
• Independent Games Festival – http://igf.com/
  The IGF is the most well-known of the indie festivals.  It’s free for students to enter, so why not? Deadline is usually in October or November, so it’s good for fall semester projects.
• Indiecade – http://www.indiecade.com/
  Another good festival with a big showing at E3. Indiecade’s deadline is usually in May or June, so it’s better for spring semester projects.
• Indie Game Challenge - http://www.indiegamechallenge.com/home/
  A relatively new contest, this one has less “prestige” than the others but has the biggest cash prizes thanks to its sponsorship by Gamestop. They have a non-professional / hobbyist category that works well for students.
• Dream Build Play – http://www.dreambuildplay.com/
  If you’re making an XNA game for Xbox 360, you should absolutely enter this contest sponsored by Microsoft. Winners have a shot at getting their game on Xbox Live Arcade.
• Experimental Gameplay Project – http://experimentalgameplay.com/
  For less-traditional games (or an exercise in prototyping), check out the Experimental Gameplay Project. They have monthly development contests for games made in seven days or less. Lots of good stuff has come out of here, like World of Goo and Henry Hatsworth. (Thanks, Lamine!)
• Ludum Dare – http://ludumdare.com/
  Another ”make a game in 48 hours” competition, but with a bit more structure. (Thanks, Lamine!)

Game Developer Blogs

• HobbyGameDev - http://www.hobbygamedev.com/
  Maintained by indie superstar Chris DeLeon, HobbyGameDev is full of great articles offering inspiration for any type of game project. There are also some interesting game criticism articles – similar to my deconstructions, but on a much higher level. 
• Wolfire Games - http://www.wolfire.com/
  Wolfire is perhaps better known for starting the Humble Indie Bundle than they are for their own games, but you won’t find them complaining about that. They’re one of the few developers to keep a devblog that highlights the day-to-day development of their upcoming title. It’s easy to read and the developers are often online to chat with.
• Extra Credits – http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits
  Well-written critiques of gaming culture with occasional tidbits of job advice. Not a “real” developer blog, but an awesome series nonetheless.  

Gaming News Websites

• Gamasutra – http://www.gamasutra.com/
  Generally regarded as the top resource for industry news, Gamasutra is operated by the same group that puts on the Game Developers Conference. It comes in a variety of flavors with network sites for mobile, indie, and digital games. There’s also a handy job search tool that may or may not be of use for you.
• EvoTab – http://www.evotab.com/
  Great game news aggregator by Reed Lakefield, original creator of the still-great GameTab. You can customize which sites it shows with ease, and it does a great job of letting you compare headlines from sources across the net. I prefer EvoTab for its lack of intrusive ads and easy color scheme, but take your pick.

First off, it’s clear that the Xbox 360 has cemented itself as my platform of choice for this generation. I don’t play a lot of games on Xbox Live, so I guess I’ve fallen victim to Microsoft’s goal of making the Xbox the “entertainment center” of the living room. I listen to a lot of my music through it, streaming off my PC. I watch most of my movies through the Netflix dashboard app. Even though the PS3 has a Bluray player, I find myself turning on the Xbox when I want to be entertained with no particular game or activity in mind.

The iPhone also appears to have replaced my DS almost entirely. I’m intrigued by the new handhelds Sony and Nintendo are hawking, but I doubt I’d spend as much time with them as I do my phone since my phone is always with me. The ease of access to buying new stuff in the app store goes a long way.

It doesn’t look like my preferred game genres have shifted much when I account for what games were actually released in each year. Strategy saw a bump thanks to two different versions of Plants vs Zombies and StarCraft II. I was surprised to find that an increase in iPhone gaming happened to correlate with a decrease in puzzle games, but that might be a testament to the kind of things developers are releasing for the app store nowadays. The chart aside, I feel like the biggest shift in my gaming preferences deals with open world games such as Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Saboteur. I’m just now getting into those games and catching the completionist bug, so they probably make up the majority of my gaming hours.

I’ve always been an early adopter of new tech in gaming – I owned a Sega Nomad, four GBA-Gamecube cables, and an eReader – so take it with a grain of salt, but 2010 represented a massive shift in the way I acquire games. The bump in digital downloads is inflated by the increase in iPhone gaming, but there was a definite increase in my DLC purchases across all platforms that support it. I’ve grown reluctant to buy games if I can’t toss a CD key into Steam and access it from anywhere. The laptop I purchased over the summer has no DVD drive at all. On my Xbox, I bought a 16 GB flash drive because I finally ran out of space on the stock 20 GB drive it came with. The only two games I played on PS3 this year were digitally downloaded.

I don’t know what all this means yet, and maybe I never will. I just find it interesting to be aware of how I consume the medium I work with.

Here’s the second entry in what I’m trying to make an annual piece – a complete list of every game I remember playing in the previous year, along with a few impressions about it. I especially enjoyed comparing this list to last year’s to see how my gaming habits have changed (more on that in a future post).

Alan Wake – Remedy (Xbox 360)
As someone who was never a huge fan of Max Payne, I was more interested in the game’s perceived similarities to Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space. The “use light to kill” mechanic was really cool for the first few hours before it became tedious and repetitive. I was also disappointed by the script and the plot – it seemed to think it was a lot smarter than it was, and I guess the developers expected it to carry the experience when the gameplay couldn’t. That said, it’s original, it’s beautiful, and it’s very playable – that is to say there aren’t many bugs or control issues. This fits nicely with Resident Evil 5 as a good game that could have been great. Finished: NO

APB: All Points Bulletin – Realtime Worlds (PC)
Read the decon for my detailed impressions.  I had fun with APB despite its flaws. Looking forward to seeing what changes are made when it relaunches later this month. Finished: N/A

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – Ubisoft Montreal (Xbox 360)
This is actually the first Assassin’s Creed game I’ve played for more than an hour or so. After hearing so many people talking about it for the last two months of the year, I decided to pick it up right after Christmas and I haven’t been disappointed. I love it when open world games give me a map with a bunch of dots that represent things to do outside of missions – I feel like I don’t have to make the commitment of time to continue the story but I can still make progress, and Brotherhood excels at offering a variety of small tasks. I’ve sunk about 12 hours into the single player and I’m less than 40% into the story, and I still haven’t touched the multiplayer. Finished: NO (still playing)

Bayonetta – Platinum Games (Xbox 360)
January / February was a crowded release window for arcade beat-em-up games, with Bayonetta falling in last places for sales against Dante’s Inferno and God of War III. The production value of Bayonetta reminds me of Metal Gear Solid, and the gameplay is familiar to any Devil May Cry fan. I’m not a big fan of the genre, but I had fun with this game for a while. The gameplay is fun, even if it occasionally results in button mashing, and the presentation couldn’t be much better. I don’t really know why I put it down…probably just not my genre, but I would highly recommend it to any God of War fan. Finished: NO

Castle Crashers – The Behemoth (Xbox Live Arcade)
This is the first of many games I played this year that came out a while ago, but for whatever reason never got around to playing until now. I played through most of Castle Crashers with some friends at Tech, and it was a blast as a four player arcade game. It does such a good job of making each player feel valuable that I haven’t played it since because it’s hard to get the same group of people together to play it. Finished: NO

Cut the Rope – Zepto Labs (iPhone)
The iPhone was my top gaming platform in 2010…which I find simultaneously embarrassing and awesome. It’s embarrassing that I was completely and totally addicted for a game called “Cut the Rope” for a while, geeking out about its masterful use of simple mechanics to create fun, complex puzzles. It’s awesome that we’re in a day and age that for under a dollar, over 100 million iPhone and iPod Touch owners have access to a fantastic game that’s simple enough for anyone to play, but deep enough to attract seasoned hardcore gamers. I can’t wait for the next update. Finished: YES

Darksiders – Vigil Games (Xbox 360)
I’ve told a lot of people that Darksiders is the best Zelda game I’ve played in years. I don’t care if a game borrows heavily from an existing title as long as it manages to be better than its source material. Darksiders is a rare example of that actually happening. It’s a Zelda game, complete with dungeons and a new weapon or accessory every hour, combined with the combat system of God of War. So what if it’s not original – it makes the player feel like a badass for 15 hours without overstaying its welcome.  If it doesn’t define “sleeper hit,” I don’t know what does. Finished: YES

Defense Grid: The Awakening - Hidden Path (PC)
I picked this up because I had heard good things and it was cheap in a Steam sale. It’s a very simple tower defense game with all the mechanics you’d expect, but it’s amazingly polished. The “speed up” and “checkpoint” functions should be in every game in the genre – unlike most defense games, Defense Grid doesn’t punish the player for failure by forcing repetition of parts that have already been completed. If you fail on wave 49 of 50, it’s ok – you can just start back at wave 45 instead of restarting everything. I ended up buying the DLC so I could keep playing. Finished: YES

Galcon – Phil Hassey (iPhone)
I bought Galcon after watching a friend play the iPad version. Although the experience isn’t quite the same on the iPhone, it’s still an addictive little strategy game. Penny Arcade called it “Space-Risk in real time,” and that’s pretty much what it is. The online multiplayer functionality is particularly impressive for the iPhone, and it’s become one of my go-to games when I have a few minutes to kill waiting for a bus or train. Finished: N/A

Global Agenda: Sandstorm – Hi-Rez Studios (PC)
As the latest subscription-free MMO on the market, Global Agenda doesn’t have a clear identity. It’s really three games in one, loosely connected by a “social” overworld. PvE and PvP missions are confined to their own maps outside of a persistent game world. The bulk of the game, the mercenary missions, feel like rounds of Team Fortress 2 more than they do an MMO. That’s not a bad thing, mind you – it’s a lot of fun – but it’s not really clear what the developers were going for here. This is a fun multiplayer shooter with an MMO slapped on top of it. Finished: N/A

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars – Rockstar Games (iPhone)
It’s GTA on the iPhone. At the time, it was a showcase for what the platform was capable of. Now that Infinity Blade is out, it’s just another top-down iPhone game. It’s a lot of fun, and it doesn’t feel like much was sacrificed in the transition to the touch controls. The problem is that it doesn’t do a good job of dealing with being on a phone. If you get a call in real life during an in-game mission, say goodbye to your progress. Finished: NO

The Incident – Big Bucket Software (iPhone)
I don’t know how to describe The Incident. It’s…odd. I liked it. Here’s a video. Finished: N/A

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks – Nintendo (DS)
Spirit Tracks takes the repetitive open-world sailing segments of Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass and transforms it into a series of repetitive on-rails segments. The dungeons are good fun, but everything in between felt tedious to me. I put about five hours into it before putting it down. Finished: NO

Lego Rock Band – Traveler’s Tales (Xbox 360)
I actually have a half-finished decon on this one sitting around that I should wrap up someday, but this game became my go to Rock Band game for a while. It has a fantastic set list for the population of the world that doesn’t like metal, and the campaign elements add depth to the series that Rock Band 2 didn’t come close to. The simple addition of a “rock den” was enough to make me play songs I didn’t care about just so I could earn enough money to decorate my virtual space with Lego-fied rock staples. It pales in comparison to the stellar Rock Band 3, but it’s a great pick up now that it’s sitting in bargain bins all over the place. Finished: N/A

Limbo – Playdead (XBLA)
I didn’t like Limbo as much as everyone else. It’s not a bad game, but I certainly didn’t think it was brilliant or even one of the top XBLA games this year. Who knows, maybe I’m just missing something. I wrote about it here. Finished: YES

Machinarium - Anamita Design (PC)
I can’t resist anything labeled as an indie darling. Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure game – a genre I’ve only gotten into in the past few years, but it’s different from the other ones I’ve played in that it isn’t comedy-driven. The art is beautiful and often carries the game, and its ability to convey emotion without dialogue is Pixar-esque. It’s perhaps too difficult in some parts, but I found myself still wanting to experience more of the game’s world every time I got stuck so I invested the time necessary to figure it out. It’s a must play for fans of the genre. Finished: YES

Mad Chad - Rock Software (iPhone)
This is a pretty standard runner I bought simply because I’m an Ochocinco fan. The premise is cute, the gameplay is polished and functional, but the graphics and sound leave a lot to be desired. It’s only $0.99, but considering what else $0.99 can get you on the App Store, it’s probably not worthwhile if you don’t care about the character. Finished: YES

Madden NFL ’11 - EA Tiburon (Xbox 360)
The defining characteristic of this year’s Madden is the commentary by CBS announcer Gus Johnson. He’s much more exciting than previous announcers, but almost to a fault. The game goes from being an awesome football simulation to being hilarious when Johnson’s tone shifts so radically from play to play. “Second down. He drops back. FIRES DOWN FIELD!!!!! …and the pass falls incomplete.” The critics will tell you that the real defining characteristic is the new Gameflow play calling system, where the game essentially calls plays for you. To be quite honest, it seems like somewhat of a natural evolution to me, and the fact that it’s still optional means it isn’t as big of a deal for gameplay as everyone makes it out to be. Finished: N/A

Mass Effect 2 - Bioware (Xbox 360)
I was one of five people on the planet who were disappointed by the first Mass Effect. My friends told me about a sprawling space opera with deep worlds and emotionally compelling gameplay, and I breezed through it in about 11 hours when Bioware said it had 60 hours of content. Clearly I’m not their target audience. Mass Effect 2′s combat was significantly more polished, and I found myself doing more of the side quests just because I wanted to level up my gear before the big boss fight. When I got to one boss, I paused, saved the game, and did my laundry. Then I returned a day later and beat it, only to watch the credits roll. Apparently I missed out on this emotional connection somewhere, because I thought the game was approaching a turning point rather than a final battle. Apparently I’m not the kind of person who should play Mass Effect, but that won’t stop me from getting the third game this year. Finished: YES

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom – The Odd Gentlemen (PC)
I passed up Winterbottom on XBLA. For some reason, the art style really turned me off. It seemed cheap rather than stylized. Playing it on my laptop, though, I got over it and found a thoroughly enjoyable puzzler underneath. The graphics grew on me too. My only gripe is that the puzzles aren’t so much a test of wit as much as they are a test of skill – meaning you just have to be good with a controller to beat them. I would have preferred more of a balance between the two, but then again, maybe that’s what Braid is for. Finished: YES

Monday Night Combat – Uber Entertainment (XBLA)
From the previews, I assumed MNC would be a cheap Team Fortress 2 rip off. Although it isn’t revolutionary, and certainly isn’t my go-to game for Xbox Live multiplayer, it adds more to the genre than it appears at first glance.  It borrows mechanics from DotA and Team Fortress without remorse, but defines its own identity in the process with its sports-arena setting and humor. Worth a try if you’re a fan of quality downloadable titles. Finished: N/A

NCAA Football ’11 – EA Tiburon (Xbox 360)
NCAA ’11 is significantly better than NCAA ’10 in that it actually compares to its contemporary Madden counterpart. The new lighting engine creates the kind of graphical leap expected from a new hardware cycle – far beyond the annual iterations the series is used to. In terms of gameplay, not much has changed. My biggest gripe with the series has been and will always be that it pales in comparison to Madden’s production value. Although they try every year, Tiburon hasn’t really nailed down the feeling of a college stadium on gameday. Finished: N/A

Osmos – Hemisphere Games (iPhone)
I didn’t “get” Osmos on PC, but it hooked me on the iPhone. I’d like to buy a beer for the designer who came up with the game’s touch controls – it’s the only time I’ve seen two and three finger touches work well without getting confusing. This is actually the only game that has made me wish I could play it on an iPad, because it would probably be even more beautiful there. Finished: YES

PixelJunk Monsters - Q Games (PlayStation Network)
Although it lacks the addictive quality of PopCap’s tower defense below, the main attraction of PixelJunk Monsters is hidden in its co-op play. I played through a good chunk of the single player campaign and put it down before a friend introduced me to the co-op, and it feels like a completely different experience. It’s couch strategy at its best, and easily worth a pickup if you have someone to play it with. That said…it’s really damn hard. Finished: NO

Plants vs Zombies - PopCap Games (iPhone)
I had already bought this game on the PC, but the idea of getting zombies off my lawn while I’m out and about seemed appealing. The port made the game feel like it was made for touch controls, and some of the touch-exclusive parts were a lot of fun. Finished: YES

Plants vs Zombies – PopCap Games (XBLA)
I had already bought this game on the PC and iPhone, but the idea of getting zombies off my lawn with a friend while getting achievement points seemed appealing. The port made the game feel like it was made for the Xbox controller, and the multiplayer parts were a lot of fun. PopCap, care to make me buy this game on yet another platform? Finished: YES

Poker Night at the Inventory – Telltale Games (PC)
The gameplay in this one is nothing special, but the presentation is worth the entire $5 asking price in itself. Telltale succeeded in making me feel like I was sitting at a table with Tycho, Max, Strongbad, and the Heavy. Their banter and shit-talk is truly hilarious, and the sheer amount of recorded dialog is staggering. I played for about four hours before any repetition became noticeable. That said, it’s only worth picking up if you like poker and you like one of those characters. Finished: N/A

Prince of Perisa: The Forgotten Sands – Ubisoft Montreal (Xbox 360)
This game came out right about the same time as Disney’s Prince of Persia movie, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that hurt sales. The game is much better than the movie and can be picked up for less than the cost of the movie’s DVD. The single player campaign lasts about eight hours and introduces a few cool mechanics to the Prince of Persia universe, such as freezing water and restoring ruins to their former glory for short periods of time. It couldn’t be more different from the series’ 2008 artsy outing, but I had a lot of fun with it. Finished: YES

Puzzle Agent - Telltale Games (iPhone)
Puzzle Agent is what you get when you take Professor Layton and make it the puzzles less fun. Graham Annable’s art is awesome, the story is cute, and the environments are interesting, but the actual puzzles are uninspired and more confusing than clever. It’s probably the only game by Telltale I wouldn’t recommend to a friend. There’s a ton of potential in a sequel, though, because the puzzles were self-contained from everything else. Make good puzzles and I’ll gladly take a second serving. Finished: YES

Red Faction Guerrilla – Volition (PC)
Red Faction has always been about blowing shit up, and Guerrilla doesn’t disappoint. The ability to destroy entire buildings is a lot of fun and no game does it as well as this one. Unfortunately, the rest of the gameplay must have not been very special because I don’t remember it. I played through a good chunk of the game before moving on to something else. Finished: NO

Robot Unicorn Attack – Adult Swim Games (iPhone)
Open your eyes, and read the decon. Finished: N/A

Rush - Two Tribes (PC)
Rush is an addictive puzzler that flew under the radar towards the end of the year from Toki Tori developer Two Tribes. I picked it up in the Steam Holiday Sale on a whim and had fun with it for a while. It’s kind of like a 3D Chu Chu Rocket…if that makes any sense. Finished: NO (still playing)

The Saboteur – Pandemic Studios (Xbox 360)
I had a weird love affair with The Saboteur. I put over 60 hours into it, completing every single mission the open-world game has to offer, and I wanted more. I recognize it has a ton of flaws, and because I’m writing a decon on it I won’t go into too much detail here. To make a long story short, I think it was a game made just for me. The setting was fantastic, the core compulsion of sabotaging Nazi installations all over Paris was exciting and addictive, and the main character was likable. I’m literally the only person I know who loved this game, much less finished it, and I know some people think less of me for doing so. Hopefully I’ll figure out why by the time I post the decon. Finished: YES

Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse – Telltale Games (PC)
I’ve been a big Sam & Max fan ever since Telltale took over the series, and The Devil’s Playhouse was the best season yet. Getting a notification that a new episode was available each month was like finding Christmas morning in my inbox. The writing was significantly better than Telltale’s previous efforts, and the puzzles themselves were more clever than ever. I for one enjoyed the new control scheme as well, which took the series away from its point and click roots and made it more controller-friendly. I can’t wait for Season 4 to be announced. Finished: YES

Scribblenauts - 5th Cell (DS)
“Write Anything, Solve Everything” is a pretty damn big tagline to live up to, but Scribblenauts delivered. It has a massive vocabulary of objects that you can interact with to solve puzzles. Unfortunately, the nature of the puzzles means you can “write any number of a set of 10 words” to “solve everything,” as just about every puzzle can be solved with the use of a jetpack, a ladder, or a gun. It’s a really cool concept and the production value is staggering, but the puzzles don’t live up to the concept itself. Finished: NO

Shadow Complex – ChAIR (Xbox Live Arcade)
Lots of people seem to like this game. I thought it was more of a tech demo for how developers can use Unreal 3.0 as an engine for something other than first person shooters. Then again, I’m usually not big on the Metroid-vania genre as it is unless I’m playing Metroid or Castlevania (which flies in the face of my Darksiders praise, but whatever). The characters and the environments are really uninspired. I mean, really, who remembers the name of the main character from Shadow Complex? Anyone? Finished: NO

SimCity Deluxe - EA Mobile (iPhone)
Unlike The Sims, SimCity works well on the iPhone. It’s essentially SimCity 2000, and there wasn’t a lot from the PC version sacrificed here. I’ve accidentally lost my save data a few times because the game expects you to explicitly save (come on guys, ALWAYS do autosave for mobile!) but the controls are usable without making too many mistakes. Props to the UI designers for coming up with something that works with touch controls – color me impressed. Finished: N/A

Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I – Dimps / Sonic Team (PS3)
I could bitch and moan like the old Sonic fan I am about how the physics are messed up and the level design isn’t right, but this is a great step towards bringing Sonic back into relevancy. The bosses in particular were well designed. I just hope Episode II doesn’t go backwards. Finished: YES

Splinter Cell Conviction - Ubisoft Montreal (Xbox 360)
Conviction is the first Splinter Cell game I’ve actually finished. The bigger emphasis on combat was a welcome shift to me, and even though I like “stealth action” gameplay, I get frustrated when games penalize me for enjoying the “action” part. With the exception of a couple missions, Conviction doesn’t do that. The co-op campaign and standalone missions are fantastic as well, and its split screen support for the dying art of couch co-op is very appreciated. Finished: YES

Split/Second – Black Rock Studio (Xbox 360)
Split/Second, also known as “Michael Bay’s San Francisco Rush,” is exhausting to play. That’s the biggest compliment I can give a racer that prides itself on capturing the feeling of speed. I was unable to play it for more than an hour at a time, but I slowly worked my way through it and learned how to deal with the massive explosions and obstacles flying towards my vehicle on every lap. It’s not “better” than Burnout, just different. Finished: YES

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty – Blizzard (PC)
StarCraft II is a very safe sequel to StarCraft, which by many accounts was the greatest RTS ever made. I haven’t grown addicted to Wings of Liberty like I did Brood War, but I don’t think that’s any fault of Blizzard’s. The single player campaign has fantastic production value and stacks up well against the story modes for any genre. The online ranking system is reasonably well designed, but some players find ways to manipulate it by dropping out of games and taking advantage of certain win/lose conditions. Given another year of tweaking, this could become my go-to PC game. Finished: NO

Super Mario Galaxy 2 - Nintendo (Wii)
This could very well be the best Mario game ever made. That doesn’t mean it’s the one I enjoyed the most, but it’s very difficult to name things I didn’t like about it. I wish it had more “new” content that hadn’t been explored in the first game, but it’s still a joy to play from start to finish. Finished: YES

Super Meat Boy – Team Meat (Xbox 360)
This is the opposite of Super Mario Galaxy 2 in that it’s a complete horror to play from start to finish. Super Meat Boy is unrelenting in its difficulty, and some of its challenges are just plain sadistic. The fact that it has the addictive compulsion to play “just one more level” makes it even more dangerous. When I play Super Meat Boy, I feel like I’m simultaneously being entertained and subjected to torture. It’s brilliant, terrible, and absolutely stupid in every way. Try it. Finished: HELL NO

Super Quickhook – Rocketcat Games (iPhone)
Super Quickhook is the spiritual successor to Hook Champ, one of my favorite iPhone games of 2009. I found Quickhook to have less charm overall, but the gameplay was more challenging and complex. I kind of want to see where Rocketcat takes the series next…it appears to be moving more towards Angry Birds than Bionic Commando like I had hoped, but then again, Angry Birds sells a bit better… Finished: NO

Trainyard – Matt Nix (iPhone)
“Trainyard” is far too simple of a description for the mind-bending puzzle game it titles.  The puzzles start out manageable - draw a line from one train depot to the next – but then get really confusing when multiple trains, different colored depots, and overlapping tracks get thrown into the mix. It’s a fantastic brain teaser – every bit as clever as Cut the Rope – and I’d like to see more stuff like this on the app store. Finished: NO

—

That’s it for 2010. Keep in mind that these are merely my opinions, and I’m not claiming to be any sort of an expert critic. Looking back is a useful exercise for me to identify trends and mechanics that are working across the entire industry, and hopefully I’ll be able to implement some of them in my own projects. Onward to 2011!

This is the paper I turned in for my senior design “capstone” class in which I’m supposed to reflect on how my coursework relates to the work I’ll be faced in a job after I graduate. I’m posting it because a number of students in Computational Media have asked me for advice about classes and other projects, and this is probably the most honest summary of my take on Tech I’ll ever write.

My time at Georgia Tech is finally coming to a close. I absolutely love being here and I certainly don’t regret enrolling as an out of state student. I’ve shown my school spirit through founding Only at Tech and representing Tech in Indiecade and the Global Game Jam, and I’m always looking for new ways to give back. More so than the classes, the people in Computational Media have helped me achieve success beyond the school and I’m very grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given that have shaped me as a designer, producer, and person.

For my capstone project, I was given the chance to work on a new game to give Georgia Tech an entry into the annual Independent Games Festival – the first time undergraduate students have been allowed to do so for course credit. To make it happen, my group had to start planning ahead of the fall semester. We built a playable prototype for the game in the spring and showed it to industry professionals for feedback during our summer internships. By the first day of class, we already had a detailed development plan and tasks for every member of the team.

Our game, A Sticky Situation, is a puzzle-platforming game for the PC and Xbox 360. Players control a piece of gum who ventures outside the world of the gumball machine in search of his girlfriend who was vended away to a customer. I came up with the original concept and the gameplay mechanics, designed a couple levels, created all the marketing materials such as the website and trailer, and composed roughly half the game’s music. The team spent entire weekends (including every day of fall break) at my apartment working on it, averaging about 40 hours a week on top of our other classes and commitments. Our final product ended up being something that we are all very proud of, and it’s currently being judged in the Independent Games Festival. We’re anxiously awaiting to get the results in January because we believe it has a real chance at being selected as a finalist.

For as much as it seems like a culmination of my time at Tech, it’s hard to believe this capstone class was only four credit hours of the hundred or so I’ve taken in Computational Media. There were a few other courses I took that were related to game development of varying helpfulness to this project.

In the first semester of my sophomore year, I took LCC 2700 (“Introduction to Computational Media”) and CS 2261 (“Media Device Architecture”). Talking to students who had already taken them, I was excited that I would have the opportunity to make games after being stuck with core courses my freshman year.

LCC 2700 was an interesting class on multiple levels. I had Brian Magerko as my instructor, and he would later sponsor my capstone project. Most of the lectures dealt with high level media theory, and I struggled to find how they were relevant to the kind of work I wanted to do. The actual assignments were much more relevant, however, and although I didn’t appreciate them all at the time, I see a lot more value in them now that I’m out of the class. I also had to read Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, which I’ve read again since completing the course. In particular, the text adventure assignment was extremely helpful in making me a better game designer. I’ve actually used Inform, the interactive fiction software from the class, during my internships to prototype scenario designs for a game in the early stages of development. Playing through it revealed limitations in the concept and helped steer the team towards a different idea.

CS 2261 is called “the GameBoy class” by most CM students because the final project is to make a functional game for the GameBoy Advance. The idea of making a GameBoy game excited me, but I quickly learned that the class itself was more about learning how a computer works than it was making games. I struggled during most of the class, and for the first time at Tech, I began to feel like I was being taught things I would never be able to use in industry. The professor told the class that many of the concepts he was teaching were “required” if we ever wanted to make games, however, I had already gone through two complete development cycles and was about to release a new game on the Xbox 360. I had been able to do all of that with little knowledge of the material in this class, so I treated it with a hint of cynicism after that.

My logic was this: I want to be a designer or a producer. If I’m working for a big company, I will never be asked to write code in those positions beyond simple scripts, and the knowledge I gained from my previous Java and Python courses should be more than sufficient for that. I realized that Computational Media didn’t offer any sort of solution for someone in my position, and I still had a number of programming courses ahead of me. Towards the end of the semester, the professor claimed that “Computational Media is for the people who want to make ‘Maya,’ not use it.” One look at the Georgia Tech website says otherwise, and I honestly haven’t been able to treat my coursework with the same amount of respect as my personal projects since then.

I ended up taking a C in 2261 because I didn’t finish the final project. I had a deadline to meet for my Xbox 360 game in order for it to get published with the launch of one of Microsoft’s new delivery platforms. I met the deadline, the game got launched, and when I started looking for internships that fall, that game was the subject of every interview. When I arrived at EA, I learned that many of my co-workers, all industry veterans, didn’t have college degrees. I had been a straight A student until I got to Georgia Tech, but when the people who have the power to give me my dream job told me flat out that my grades don’t matter to them, it made it very difficult for me to put in the effort required to get A’s here.

In the fall semester of 2009, after my first internship, I enrolled in LCC 4725 (“Game Design as a Cultural Practice”). Even though I don’t like experimental games, I decided that this class would at least let me make something I might be able to add to my portfolio. I made a flash game called Interfaced with five other students for the class project, and I ended up working with many of these students again for my capstone project. The best part about this class was that the professor allowed team structures to reflect development teams in the industry, where each person has one or two disciplines. This was the only class I took at Georgia Tech that allowed group projects to work this way – the only time I didn’t have to do any programming.

The game itself wasn’t great, but I earned valuable experience working with the team through development. Apart from a few student-taught classes on Flash development, there was very little direction for the project from the class itself. We worked independently in apartments and coffee shops to get the game finished, learning from our mistakes as we went. This is actually my favorite way to make games because it’s almost exactly like what I do on my own time with personal projects, and it’s how the capstone game was developed as well.

I took CS 4455, “Video Game Design,” in the spring semester of 2010. I had to pull some strings to get into the class because I hadn’t taken one of the prerequisites, but the professor agreed my experience with game editors from my internship were a sufficient substitute for the CS 3451 Computer Graphics course. I arrived to the first day of class excited that I was going to get to spend class time doing nothing but game design.

It turns out the “design” portion of the class was worth 5% of the overall grade. The rest was programming. My heart sank, and I ended up struggling the entire semester. To make matters worse, the class required us to use C4, an obscure mess of a game engine. The only commercially released game C4 has been used in is City Bus Simulator 2008, and if you haven’t heard of it before, that’s exactly my point. Rather than teaching us how to use an editor associated with a game engine, we were taught all the tricks and workarounds for making C4 “kind of” do what we wanted it to. The class has since switched to the widely-used Unity game engine, so this complaint has mostly been addressed, but the fact that all students are still required to do programming in it and CS 3451 is still a prerequisite makes me believe that the games industry’s definition of “design” is somewhat different from Georgia Tech’s.

To reinforce that point, I was very frustrated during this capstone project when the advisor gave the team a failing grade for the “design” portion of a milestone early in the semester. I had created a wiki that detailed every mechanic in our game and every kind of interaction the player could have with it. There were descriptions of every level and sketches or videos of puzzles that had been prototyped. If printed out, it would have easily amounted to over thirty pages of content. We received a failing grade because, according to the advisor, that kind of work was not “design” but rather “concept,” and “design” meant he needed to see UML diagrams for the engine’s code. Georgia Tech is the only place I’ve ever encountered that definition of the word.

There are classes I’ve found to be very useful that aren’t directly related to the CM program. On the first day of her Science Fiction course (LCC 3214) last semester, Professor Lisa Yaszek told us her hopes for the course were to give us “cocktail talk.” She wasn’t trying to change the way we think about media, but rather wanted us to be more knowledgeable about a subject she was passionate about so we could share in discussing it with employers or co-workers. This past summer at EA, I was able to hold my own in a spontaneous discussion about Asimov.

I took MUSI 3450 (“Survey of Music Technology”) in my freshman year. It ended up being mostly math, and I was really unhappy for most of the course. Towards the end, though, I got to work with Reason 4.0, an advanced music authoring program. When a game I was making six months later needed a soundtrack, I was able to hop in and compose something. I’ve been writing music for my games ever since. This past summer, my team was entertaining Hollywood composers I was able to talk with them about how composition for games is different from composition for film. I’m certainly no expert, but I was competent enough for them to be interested in what I was saying. It was an empowering feeling and one of the more memorable opportunities I’ve taken with me from my work experience.

This essay calls for me to point out the concepts and skills I learned in these courses that will help me in life after I graduate. I’ve learned more during my time at Georgia Tech than I can possibly put on paper, but I’ve learned very little from my classes. Maybe I could say I reinforced my basic knowledge of Python and Java with my CS classes, or that I gained extra experience working with others on group projects, but to put it bluntly, I found many of the classes in Computational Media to be distracting from the things that I believe will bring me success in the future.

I’m not writing this as an angry or disillusioned college student. I love Georgia Tech and I’d come here again given the option. I believe this is the most honest way I can explain the things I’ve learned from this school that I will take with me for the rest of my life.

Computational Media’s website promises that the degree “can be shaped into whatever specialties you enjoy – from graphic design and web development to film animation or game development.” In my experience, it can’t be shaped into anything that specific because students don’t have the option to focus their studies beyond broad media theory classes. This stems from the major’s unique structure – when students are required to evenly split their courses between two very different disciplines,  it makes them capable of many things, good at some things, but great at nothing.

I came into Georgia Tech wanting to be a game designer. If I was to do nothing outside of classes, I would have a fairly substantial knowledge of computer science theory (but very little programming experience) and basic familiarity with the Adobe Creative Suite. I’d also know a bit about media theory. After working one summer at Electronic Arts, I realized I had far more programming knowledge than I would ever need as a designer, but no 3D modeling experience – something that is essentially required to get a job anywhere in this industry. My knowledge of both disciplines might make me a good candidate for a producer, but I haven’t been able to take any sort of public speaking or finance courses beyond basic economics. No one would hire me as a programmer over someone with a degree in Computer Science, and my art skills, although not bad for a designer, are nowhere near good enough to get me a job as an artist.

To get the experience I needed, I looked outside of classes. I started a company and made a game with two other students during my sophomore year. When we had deadlines for various competitions coming up, we’d explain to our professors what was going on and show them what we were up to. They thought it was cool, but if we asked for an extension on a class assignment or for a little bit of leeway, we were immediately shut down. We all took multiple zeroes on assignments the semester Audiball was released, and it’s the only way the game would have gotten done. As a result of making Audiball, all three of us landed internships with EA. They didn’t care about my classes or even ask for my GPA. They just wanted to know about what I learned from making a game on my own.

The thing is, Audiball wasn’t even that great of a game. Apart from a couple crazy critics who thought the game was some sort of visionary pinnacle of innovation in rhythm games, most players panned it as over-complicated and ugly. EA was only impressed that I had managed to make something from start to finish and get it published. The quality of the product was irrelevant. What I did with Audiball is something every CM student should be able to do. Why is there no class at Tech with a final project that involves publishing something on Xbox Live Indie Games? The ability for me to tell someone to turn on an Xbox and download my game was amazingly powerful in every job interview I’ve had – much more valuable than telling someone to hop on my website, download a GBA emulator, download my game, and try to get the two to talk to each other.

Looking back, the fact that I didn’t get the kind of experience I needed through classes ended up being a good thing for me. If I had been making marketable games all throughout my college career like students at Carnegie Melon and USC, I probably wouldn’t have felt the need to start my own companies and work on so many independent projects. Having a resume that shows I did all of that independent work on top of school makes me a much more attractive candidate for the jobs I’ve applied for. Just like in the real workplace, I knew that I couldn’t do everything on my own so I found people who shared my drive for success and worked with them to achieve something.

I learned how to manage a business on my own. I learned how to prioritize commitments. I learned about what capacities in which I should trust other people, and perhaps more importantly, those in which I shouldn’t. I learned to know when I should solve problems on my own and when I should ask for help. I learned that developing games is what I want to do for the rest of my life, and there’s no satisfaction quite like seeing other people enjoy the things you’ve made. Those are the things I came to college to learn, and as crazy as it might sound, I owe founding those companies to Georgia Tech’s lack of relevant course offerings.

My regret is the way that Georgia Tech treated my success with independent projects. While they were being worked on, most professors were unsupportive and I had to let my grades suffer to get them finished. But as soon as a final product was released, people from all over the school wanted us to tell them all about it. I was thrilled that Georgia Tech put a picture of me on the front page of their website when Audiball was released, but it’s a very clear problem when I get to that point because I skipped classes and poured my heart into something with no help from the school.

When I was asked to answer a few questions for a “student profile” on the Computational Media website this semester, I decided I wasn’t a good person to represent this major for the reasons above. Right now, the best advice I can give (and have given) to other CM students is to work on personal projects and make games. When people ask me what courses they should take, I tell them “it doesn’t matter” aside from a couple gems in the rough. When people ask me why I’m in CM despite all of these complaints and criticisms, I tell them it’s because of the CM students. We’re in a major where we aren’t gaining the kind of experience we need to get jobs. Therefore, we feel the need to do work outside of classes. I don’t see that kind of passion in other majors, and I don’t know that I would have found students willing to start companies with me anywhere else. Those are the most honest answers I can give based on my experiences over the past four years.

The simplest change I would like to see in the Computational Media program is an increased emphasis on projects that can be used to kick start portfolio pieces. Students interested in game development need to be made more aware that they own the IP of games they make for classes, and encouraged to continue developing them after those classes end. School sponsored development teams and increased involvement with the many game making competitions available to students would do wonders for helping talented CM students meet the people they need to form complete teams and produce quality games that will help the program get noticed.

Maybe my concerns are part of the trick with Georgia Tech. The school’s reputation for shaping qualified individuals is unmatched, and everyone knows about the crazy workloads we have to deal with. A single look at Only at Tech shows that the campus is united by the stress we all share in our everyday classes. Even though we complain about it, we’re gain a huge sense of pride from it. The fact that our computer science building was funded by a Tech dropout summarizes the pride we all feel for our community better than anything I can describe in words.  I’m proud that I’ve been able to accomplish what I have outside of classes, but I’m equally proud that I will be the first person in my family to get a college degree from one of the top universities in the country.

But you might also remember a time when the game was the one of the most anticipated titles around – back when it was revealed at GDC 2008, in a presentation by GTA creator and RTW CEO Dave Jones. That presentation happened to be the first talk I ever attended at a GDC, and it left an impression on me. I remember the entire room erupting with applause and cheers every time they showed a new feature in the character customization system. I remember the people around me instantly calling it a “WoW killer.” Then it suddenly disappeared from the media, and we heard almost nothing about it in the two years between that talk and its release. I’m not an MMO fan, but I really looked forward to APB.

I was working at Visceral Games when it came out this summer, and everyone in the office was shocked by the beating it took on Metacritic. We all wanted to play it to see the damage for ourselves, but due to the reviews none of us wanted to actually buy it. The cycle of doubt fixed itself when my lead presented me with a copy of APB as a going away present on my last day of work. I played it, analyzed it, and tried to come up with some insights that can be gained from it.

APB: All Points Bulletin

Developer: Realtime Worlds
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Genre: Shooter / MMO
Metacritic: 58
Price: $49.99
Subscription: $7/20hrs or $10/month

Background
APB is the first (and last) MMO by Crackdown developer Realtime Worlds. It places players in the city of San Paro, a modern metropolis where criminals roam the streets and everyday citizens have been given the go to bring them to justice. Players can choose which side to align with – “enforcers” or “criminals” – and do their part to eliminate the other faction. The premise is simultaneously obvious, awesome, and vastly underdeveloped for the genre. Cops vs Robbers is fun, and you could say the theme has proven to be mildly successful in games, so why not make it into an MMO?

World
Remember the description above, where I said San Paro was a “modern metropolis?” APB only lets you visit three areas of it, none of which are terribly large. The game has two “action districts” (Financial and Waterfront) and one “social district.” The action districts are where you’ll find PvP gameplay, and the social district consists of very little socializing but is free to play and doesn’t eat up game time. It’s also where you go to buy items for your character. The district select menu comes up when you login to the game, and it pretty much sticks to expectations for the game’s overall lack of polish.

The social district looks fine, and has a few cool features to boot. It reminds me of the few things that don’t suck about Second Life in that players can buy ad space on billboards with in game currency, create content such as clothing designs and songs, and sell them in a marketplace. I found its layout to be somewhat annoying because it forces the player to run from one end to the other to go from customizing a car to customizing a shirt. If players actually spent time there talking or doing in-game activities, it might be different, but as it was, it was nothing more than silly filler. It spits in the face of the MMO’s fiction, claiming that “nobody knows how or why” there’s no fighting in it, but sure, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.

The action districts are where actual gameplay happens, and where players spend their prepaid game time. I’ll elaborate more on the gameplay in a  bit, but the world’s themselves deserve a bit of attention here. Both action district maps are fairly small, but they’re very well designed. The layouts are intuitive and make for interesting fights and cover situations, with a focus on navigating both the interiors and exteriors of buildings, from the basements to the rooftops. They feel like the open worlds they need to be. Graphically, they leave a lot to be desired – they’re rather bland in comparison to the player-managed social district, and the environment looks particularly out of place when filled with player-created content like avatars and cars.

Customization
With its robust customization engine, players only have to take the APB as seriously as they want to. The character creator lets you be anyone from a jacked-up, tatted-out gang member to an overweight soccer mom, and the car editor lets you make a matching sportscar or minivan to boot. The game features multiple editors that can be accessed from different computer terminals in San Paro’s Social District. If you haven’t seen a demo of this customization engine before, you owe it to yourself to check it out:

APB puts every other game with a character editor to shame. I was previously enthralled by the editor in City of Heroes, and this makes it look like a piece of crap. It’s absolutely unbelievable how easy it is to make something awesome with the tools they give you. I spent over an hour creating my character before I even got into the game because the designer in me was having so much fun.

It’s even more unbelievable to me that this piece of the game is so polished and feature complete in the face of everything else. It feels like a completely different game.

Gameplay
At its core, APB is a driving and shooting game.  Reviewers complained that neither driving nor shooting controlled particularly well, and therefore it was broken. It’s true that the controls are a bit weird, but then again, it’s an MMO. I can live with a little bit of lag if everyone else is having it too. The controls aren’t too bad if you take the time to get used to them.

Perhaps the bigger problem is that there isn’t a lot of variety outside of driving and shooting. In the game’s tutorial, you run up to a fence and press the “F” key to vault over it with a fluid animation. Then you walk up to a door and press the same “F” key to diffuse a bomb – an animation so laughably bad that the character sometimes even faces the wrong way or doesn’t touch the bomb in question. I’m not knocking the game for using context sensitive actions, but when you find out that nearly every mission in APB is based on running up to doors and holding “F” or preventing someone else from holding “F,” all with terrible animation, the game’s world falls apart.

When inside an action district, you press a “ready” key to be able to receive missions. Sometimes it takes as long as five or ten minutes for a mission to be delivered to you, and there’s nothing to do in the interim apart from customizing your weapon loadout or exploring the environment. You’ll either be assigned to a group mission, start a new mission, or sent to prevent an enemy team (cops or robbers) from completing a mission. This is where the game shines.

Being sent out to prevent other players from completing objectives feels great. Players from all over the city are called to a central location via the GPS. You can hop in a car with another player or drive on your own. There’s a ton of strategy for players to use, and teams actually have to work together to accomplish anything. A team trying to complete an objective might send someone out on the rooftop of a building to scout for enemies, and a team trying to stop an objective might try to flank the target site from multiple angles to prevent access. APB delivered on its promise with that experience.

If you die, you respawn close to the action. Fail cases are objective-based in relation to targets on the map or in relation to what are essentially miniature team deathmatch games, such as a case where the first team to 10 kills wins. Respawning so quickly feels odd in an MMO setting, but reveals the game’s deathmatch roots. That’s really all APB’s gameplay boils down to – team deathmatch inside an MMO, but it brings out the best in team deathmatch.

The game’s brilliance fades as quickly as it comes. Once one team wins, all players become neutral again regardless of team affiliation. There are obvious gameplay implications for doing it this way, but if the fiction and the gameplay demand for me to arrest or eliminate criminals as an enforcer, it doesn’t make sense that I suddenly can’t hurt them at all and we go our separate ways. APB reveals itself as a buddy cop fantasy, where you and your friends can be Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, but then you have to turn around and let the bad guys get away just when things start to get tough.

Conclusion
Even though I was annoyed by quirks with the gameplay, I kept playing APB because of the customization engine. I always wanted to reach the next level to unlock the next car or the next cool piece of clothing for my avatar, and seeing other players running around with the best equipment served to reinforce that. Realtime Worlds wasn’t kidding when they said no two players will look the same in APB, and that’s the coolest part of it. It’s just a shame that there’s not much to do with your character or your car once you have everything customized the way you want.

I feel like this game would be more fun if it wasn’t an MMO – that feeling of emptiness after a mission wouldn’t happen if there was no persistent world. Toss 32 players (16 cops / robbers) into a huge map with the objective-based gameplay, but end it once one team wins and start a new round. Keep all of the customization options locked into a menu system outside of gameplay. It’s GTA meets Team Fortress, and the MMO part seems to get in the way.

The rights to APB have been purchased by a free-to-play game company, and it should be back online sometime early next year. I’ll write a little update when I have a chance to get back in the game and see what changes they’ve made.

]]> http://holdenlink.com/2010/11/game-deconstruction-apb/feed/ 1 http://holdenlink.com/2010/11/hey-look-listen/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hey-look-listen http://holdenlink.com/2010/11/hey-look-listen/#comments Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:33:54 +0000 Holden http://holdenlink.com/?p=838 It’s a new game! This is what I’ve been up to since leaving EA this summer.

www.longlastingflavor.com

I haven’t been away from the game long enough to write a formal deconstruction, but I’ve been talking to a lot of friends about Playdead’s Limbo recently. My opinion differs from the majority (not to say I’m on my own), and I think writing it in the blog is the best way to articulate the angle I’m coming from. In doing so, I hope I’ll be able to get some feedback on why the things that bothered me made the game better for everyone else.

Art Style

The first thing everyone talks about when they see Limbo is the unique minimalist art style. It’s looks absolutely beautiful in motion, and it creates an incredible mood for the game’s world. It evokes all sorts of emotions without the use of language, and it undeniably leaves an impression with the player.

Unfortunately, I found a huge drawback to this art style in the context of Limbo‘s gameplay. It’s not always clear what the player can and can’t interact with in each area, and the VFX often work against it. The majority of the times I got stuck in the game were because I didn’t know what I was supposed to be interacting with (i.e. pushing buttons on signs that change the direction of gravity). I’m all for a cool look, but it’s a design failure when it interferes with the player’s ability to understand their environments. It’s not “clever” or “innovative” to confuse the player about what they can and can’t interact with in the game world, and a few too many puzzles fell into that category for my taste.

Death

Like Another World before it, Limbo has an obscene number of graphic death scenes. It’s no secret that, no matter how attached to their characters, players love seeing them get mangled in creative and unexpected ways – take a look at Dead Space or Resident Evil, for example. There are “all the ways to die” videos on YouTube with millions of hits, and artists clearly put a lot of effort into making sure players are satisfied.

The difference between deaths in Dead Space and Limbo is that the player doesn’t always have control in Limbo. In fact, death is treated not as a punishment for failure but as a way of showing the player the solution to a scripted event puzzle. One section in particular highlights this, where the player approaches a switch surrounded by two small crevices on either side. Stepping on the switch causes a piston to come down and smash the player into the ground. A few steps further down the hallway lies an identical looking switch, but stepping on this switch is actually the only way to prevent the piston from falling. There are no visual cues to solving this puzzle before you get to it – the player must learn entirely from trial and error.

It’s harmless enough because the game respawns the player right in front of the switch hallway, but why is it necessary? Are players supposed to think the developer is clever for misleading them? Is it just a general “screw you” to the audience? Here’s a game that is advertised for its artistic value and innovation, and puzzles like this are simply time wasters that artificially extend an already short gameplay experience.

Death animations are only entertaining to a point. Limbo’s shining moments are its clever puzzles, and these death scenes are the complete opposite. Roughly 10% of the events in the game are nearly impossible to avoid on the first attempt, 60% are trial and error, and the remaining 30% are actually clever puzzles that award the player with a sense of accomplishment.

Takeaways

Much like the world of the game itself, Limbo’s moments of brilliance are shrouded in darkness. This is a game I really wanted to like – I bought it before trying the demo and talked about it with friends before its release – but I found it to be a huge disappointment. It’s not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not worth fifteen dollars and I’m baffled as to how it’s maintained over a 90 on Metacritic. It’s easily trumped by Xbox Live companions ’Splosion Man and Braid. Maybe today’s gamers really do appreciate those crazy death animations more than actual game design.

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