So, since making my first Flash game last week I have been quite quiet, working on something a bit bigger. I think it will be a while until it is ready to show to the wider world though, so I am wondering about knocking together a few more micro games.

In the mean time I’ve been amusing myself by thinking up pretentious indie games (or “prindies” as I have been calling them, to nobody but myself).

I have a theory that you an probably get a fair amount of press and web interest in your simple game, as long as you frame it within an idea that could be interpreted as “games being art”. What the gameplay is like is irrelevant really, and doesn’t even need to be particularly related to the game’s theme.

If anything, the more disparate the two halves of the game, the better (at least for comedy value).

So far the ones that have tickled me the most are:

The Aching Loneliness of Being
It is an experience (do not call it a game) about the delicate mind of a child with autism and his struggle to befriend the other children in his school class, who don’t understand him. Gameplay-wise it’s going to be snake, but with blockier graphics.

the voyage[sic]
A game that focuses on the transpiritual journey of an aging learned man whose life-long faith is opened up before him, exposing his psyche to the positive and negative aspects of this experience. The complex storytelling and structured characterisation will place players within the man’s mind, and so they will also take the same magical journey. Obviously in videos it will look a lot like Pacman, but with only one ghost.

Remorse (Love)
A game about your death, and what it would feel like to be trapped on the other side of a transparent soundproof divide, able to see your loved ones in heartbreaking sorrow, but to be unable to comfort them. What if you could see their life stretched out ahead of them, and the future happiness they will find? The new partner they will meet and grow to cherish, and the laughter of the children they will have. Your memory gradually slipping from their thoughts. A Gears of War mod.

Can you, my handful of readers, come up with any more comedy pretentious indie games? Either slap them in the comments, or get them on Twitter #prindie

Wow. I have got to say I am seriously impressed by this.

Those are the words I can guarantee nobody will say when they play the game that I made tonight.

Thing is, although it’s a horribly unimpressive chase game with no polish whatsoever, I made it in less than five hours.

That’s five hours from not knowing anything at all about Flash programming, to having a very simple working game that people can play on the web with no fuss. That’s not entirely shit, I don’t think.

Thing is, I can’t take much credit for it. The game uses the Flixel engine, written by Adam Atomic (of Canabalt fame). His work does all of the heavy lifting, the actual drawing, the collision detection, and even the creation of the very basic graphics. All I’ve done is thrown some stuff in there.

So, rather than this post being about how awesome my most awesome game is, this is a post encouraging any designers out there who want to get their hands dirty to go and look at Flixel, and get started on the tutorials here.

So, as you’re no doubt aware (I do kind of assume that my readers visit other sites to catch up on what is going on in the games industry. At least I hope they do, ’cause they’d find out almost nothing from my ramblings) Microsoft have announced the launch titles for Kinect.

Depending on your point of view it is either an exciting or depressing lineup. The list is heavy on dancing games, sport minigame compilations, and “fitness” titles. Fighters Uncaged and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (it fair old rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it?) look to be the most “core” titles.

Yeah, Harry Potter is one of the titles most likely to appeal to the 360′s current audience.

But that’s fine, right? Kinect isn’t aimed at those people who have made the 360 a success by buying Gears of War, Call of Duty, and various other testosterone-y games. It’s aimed at the happy families that feature so heavily in the marketing materials.

(Does anybody expect children to enthusiastically high five after playing Kinect Joy Ride, by the way? Surely it is far more likely that the two kids would end up hitting each other “accidentally”?)

Thing is, are the intended market the sort of people to spend £150 on a new gadget at launch, having not played it? Or are they more likely to buy it months down the line, having drunkenly played it at a friend’s house over New Year?

Who is the type of person who has over a hundred quid (how much over will of course depend on how many games you want to buy with it) burning a hole in their pocket, ready to splash out on a new toy the moment it is released?

The Call of Duty players?

The problem with looking at all of the games on your “pile of shame” and thinking “meh” is that you end up wanting to spend more money, on more games.

Having had a pretty good hit rate with enjoying Halo games, most recently really getting in to ODST, I decided to put a bit of faith in Halo Reach. And I am very glad I did.

I’ve written before about why I think Halo was pretty special, and even though that was ages ago (and before Halo 3 came out) it all still stands true to me.

So instead of repeating myself I’ll mention some of the things that I noticed playing Reach. It’s time to break out the bullet points!

• The first thing that impressed me was that I got the game when it was a couple of weeks old, and it didn’t auto-patch as soon as I started playing. I cannot remember the last time I played a big game that didn’t need to patch within a week.
• The player money that you earn as the player investment system is shared over multiplayer and single player, with your character appearing the same in both as well. This is great for someone like me who doesn’t really play that much multiplayer. I can keep slogging away at the single player campaign, and still be earning pretty pink bows for my hair.
• They have changed the selection of insignia backgrounds, pictures, and colours. I cannot recreate my nice cat from Halo 3. This makes me a little sad. I don’t know why they would remove stuff from here – surely more options are better, when the assets already exist, and it’d allow clans to carry insignias over untouched?
• The engine seems pretty creaky. There is a very odd blurring effect that causes strange ghosting during some cutscenes and when you spin around quickly. It’s also not at a rock solid frame rate in single player.
• I like games with sunny skies and sandy beaches, even if I am killing aliens on them. It’s just nice to not be in a war-torn Arabic city for a change.
• Some of the level design seems a step above what Halo usually manages. A particular highlight was a level set in a futuristic city, that utilised a lot of height differences. The enemies were placed to get the upper hand if you went in all guns blazing, but if you took the time to jetpack around the back, you got a nice tactical advantage.
• Oh and the space mission was pretty good. Not amazing, but a nice change. I would actually have loved a mission where I had to fight on the surface of a ship (sort of like the ending to Mass Effect), though. Maybe there is one – as I write this I’m maybe two thirds of the way through the campaign.

No doubt there are other treats waiting for me. As usual the multiplayer seems well constructed, with good matchmaking. Just remember to leave your headset turned off.

Thank you, Halo Reach, for making me happy to have spent £40 on a game again.

Reading a few of my recent posts, I became a bit cross at myself.

The last three updates have been essentially saying “I think these games are pretty boring”. Possibly four if you count the one about the silly tutorial in Tropico 3. And these are games with big budgets, a lot of love and attention put in to them, mostly solid mechanics, and a good level of polish.

There isn’t any real reason why I shouldn’t like them, but I just don’t.

Which got me thinking two things.

First, I should write about a game that I’ve been enjoying recently. So here it is: For just under an hour every day for the last few weeks, I’ve been playing Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light.

It’s an Xbox Live Arcade / Playstation network title, and it is brilliant. The main reason that it is brilliant is that is has managed to capture most of what Tomb Raider “is”, while changing the viewpoint to being roughly isometric. It has gun combat. It has puzzles (oh my word, it has puzzles, it is a particularly devious swine). It has some platforming. Not as much platforming as Tomb Raider should have – that’s the area that it hasn’t managed to translate so well.

It also has longevity, if you want it to. Each level has a series of challenges, from pickups and power ups that are hidden away, to “challenge rooms” which are pretty much standalone puzzles, to time and score goals.

The first time playing through a level I think it took us around twenty minutes to half an hour a pop. This was scouring the level for red skulls (each level has ten) and power ups. Usually we’d find them all, sometimes not. Looking back at the challenge sheet, and you will usually see that the level can be completed in five minutes, or less. Crikey. You’re going to have to come back with a much bigger gun. (Actually, most of the time attacks are achieved by not stopping to fight, and just hurtling as fast as possible through a level, leaving most of the baddies standing around scratching their backsides.)

Did you notice what I said at the start of the previous paragraph? I said “us”. The entire game is playable in two player co-op, with the skills that Lara has when playing solo split between players. Each puzzle changes configuration slightly to allow this to work. It must have been a fair whack of work to make happen, but it was definitely worth it – I know that I can go and play any level by myself and will have to rethink solutions to puzzles that I know how to do with two.

So there you go – there’s a game that I have been loving recently. Now this blog isn’t all hate and gloom.

The second thing that I thought is that I should stop playing games because I feel like I should. I’m getting game apathy.

I get so far through ratchet & Clank that, even though I’m not really digging it, I feel like I should complete it. “It’s probably only another five hours or so,” I say to myself. And then I play for another five joyless hours. That’s not what gaming’s about.

So I am having a huge cull of the pile of shame. Out goes anything I am halfway through but trying to force myself to play. Out goes anything I haven’t started, and bought because it’s meant to be “alright” and it was cheap.

I am clearing the decks and only committing my time to things that really grab me. I figure this should relieve my gaming funk.

I feel really quite bad for admitting this (especially so soon after saying the same thing about Ratchet & Clank, I have a feeling I’m about to get written off as an Xbox fanboy), but despite giving it a lot of time, God of war 3 is boring me.

I am pretty sure it is all to do with scale and scope.

God of War looked amazing for a PS2 game, and had some spectacular vistas and fights that ran at a good frame rate. Fighting gigantic monsters, killing gods, seeing whole cities burn to the ground in the distance – it was impressing people on technical and artistic levels, both at the same time.

But now, I have killed my way through a dozen or so gods, and the novelty of punching straight through the face of another is wearing a little thin. Which one did I just kill? Who am I pissing off now? This has the run-on effect of when the next boss makes himself known and threatens to destroy you, there’s no thrill there any more. I know I’m going to tear his arms off and make him eat them. It’s happened to many times before for any other outcome to be possible.

And on a technical level, what God of War does is no longer that impressive. The hardware has become a great leveller. Dozens of games have shown me spectacular battles between huge armies. Draw distances are regularly further than even the most bionic of men could see. Showing that I’m having a fight on the back of a lump of rock that’s slowly climbing up a mountain doesn’t blow minds any more.

There are also some very odd choices of framing, I thought. Making my character really small on screen for extended periods doesn’t make me feel that the scene is epic, it just makes it hard to play when I’m sat at the proper distance from my TV.

When the camera pulls right out as you traverse the sword bridge in God of War it pulls right back in again. This section is also linear (you can only go two, opposite, directions on the bridge) and there’s no combat during it. These are all reasons why it works. Pull the camera right back, allow me more freedom of movement, and throw a bunch of enemies in to the mix, and I can’t make out what’s going on.

All of this is not to say it’s a bad game, and I feel kind of churlish for complaining about it. Maybe my expectations were too high, having been blown away by the previous God of War titles. I’m not really sure what I was expecting from it, and it does follow the existing God of War recipe to a tee. The combat and puzzling-lite are the same as before, and they have improved the readability of the quick time events by showing the face button icons on the edge of the screen that corresponds to their arrangement on the pad.

I think I was just kind of expecting something else. Or something “more”.

I finally got around to playing the demo of Enslaved last night (I was going through a few demos I had downloaded, but not played).

I must admit, I’m amazed that it has been getting the review scores it has. Though Eurogamer did say that it picks up after the start, so maybe Ninja Theory have just put the wrong bit of the game in the demo?

Anyway, this is going to be an ugly bullet point list, so here we go:

• Environments are ugly to me – lots of detail in the textures but not really showing anything, if that makes sense? I can’t remember the word for it off the top of my head, but it’s just a lot of little pointless mechanical details and stuff that serve to just make very visually complicated textures that all blur into noise at a medium distance.
• Lighting was horrible in the interior – bright green & red reminded me of early Unreal 1 levels. Shadowing was too soft even in out of the way bits, gave the scene no depth.
• Character designs were a boringly generic semi-naked muscle man, and semi-naked lithe redhead girl.
• Andy Serkis doing his usual overacting and gurning away. Worked really well for being Gollum, but I wouldn’t say it’s been so successful in anything else I’ve ever seen him in. Still, other people seem to like his idea of acting.
• Platforming was boring. Linear routes that are all highlighted out for you, so there is no sense that you have achieved anything or found your own route.
• Combat was dull button mashing. Again, no sense that I was choosing which cool moves to do, or even really which enemy to attack.
• Gameplay and the “in game” cutscene cameras regularly broke rules about crossing the line which made a lot of the scenes really confusing to me. The combat camera I actually quite liked, as it had the right amount of dynamism that made combat feel punchier. It was too close in though, Batman AA does a better job of pulling back to show the enemies while still being close enough in to make you feel connected.
• One thing in particular that put me off was that the game has really floaty controls – the main character has no weight to him at all. As an example of this stand still and flick the stick left and right. Monkey launches himself into a full on sprint for half a second, then does the same in the other direction, but with no inertia.
• The level design had some very stupid things. Unless I’m confused – the level is meant to be a prison ship of some kind? And the robots you fight are the guards? Because there are doors that are locked until you kill the right number of robots, when they automatically unlock. So if my take on the situation is right, this is a prison that unlocks when you kill enough guards? It just smacks of really uninventive progression blockers.
• Oh and the movie that plays when the demo ends – the firts shot is of someone driving a bike through a landscape of a really horrible repeating texture. Looked like late 90′s FMV.

I will be staying well clear, I think.

Well, not “shit” exactly, but there’s definitely something rotten going on, and I liked the title too much not to use. Anyway…

I am a big fan of Ratchet & Clank. Long term readers may remember this (as I have mentioned it before, even to the point of listing all of the previous games, and rating them).

So why can’t I get on with Crack in Time? I’ve picked it up a few times, and even played through a fair amount of it so far (GameFaqs suggests I’m about half way through the story), but I’m just not loving it. I have to force myself to go back and play more. This is a sad state of affairs for me – R&C used to be something I would rely on for hours of fun.

As I’ve been playing it and mulling the question over in my head, I have come up with some possible explanations.

• The story line has gone from being comical and absurd, to taking itself far too seriously. It used to be about saving the galaxy from some hammy space dictator, while bumping in to other ridiculous characters. Now Clank has a father, and has been specially created to be a caretaker of time. Ratchet has met another Lombax (he was meant to be the only one left), who is a generic troubled outcast who knew Ratchet’s dad. Quark is still bumbling around the place, but even the joke of constantly saving him is wearing thin. Ludicrously named MacGuffins are introduced with po-faced seriousness, rather than with a knowing looking from the cast that they accept this is stupid.
• The graphics are great, but the extra detail over-complicates things. One the PS2 the relatively low poly counts of individual geometry and enemies, combined with clean texturing, gave a nice cartoony look that helped you identify important features (such as things that were coming to kill you). With the extra horsepower of the PS3 there is detail everywhere, and a lot gets lost in the visual clutter. I would have been interested to see them go for a much cleaner cel shaded look, to be honest.
• Actually, everything is over-complicated now. The range of gadgets that are in the game as legacy items is too big, and has been added to with new things. There are too many types of interaction available now, as a result you have to remember a lot of special cases.
• There just isn’t the care an attention to detail there used to be. A prime example is in the save system. Though the game checkpoints regularly, and you can do a proper save at any point from the menu, on reloading you are likely to be returned to a much earlier spawn point. Just this morning I had to repeat a 20 minute section of gameplay, for no particular reason that I could tell other than what appeared to be a perfect place for a hard save apparently wasn’t. There doesn’t seem to be the number of unlockable comedy cheats, or bonus hidden away paths through levels, either.

So yeah, it could be any of those things. I just find it a shame when something that I used to love has become a hollow shell, going through the motions of what used to make it good, but without ever hitting the same quality.

With the next Ratchet & Clank game being a multiplayer title based on crossing over with Jak & Daxter and Sly Cooper, I don’t hold out much hope for a return to form. Sounds a bit too “Destroy all monsters” to be any good.

I picked up Tropico 3 ages ago. I vaguely remembered reviews being quite positive, and it being described as being like Sim City, but on a tropical island – Sim Castro. It sounded like the sort of thing I could relax with on a weekend, or get lost in and forget what time it was.

I finally got around to giving it a go the other day, and though I was right about what the game would be like, I had no idea it would be so hard to get in to.

The main problem the game has is that it’s got a tutorial that doesn’t actually teach you how to play the game.

I mean, it teaches you the cold hard mechanics of how the game is played: X button selects things; How to move the camera around (left & right sticks – I’m glad the game told me this because there is no way I would ever have guessed at such a control system); How to build things, fire workers, and make a speech.

But it doesn’t tell you how to actually play the game. On a new island, what is the first thing I should build? In a general sense am I better off with tobacco, pineapple, or papaya farms? When my citizens are complaining about housing, but won’t move in to the nice houses I’ve bought, what should I do?

People keep becoming rebels – how should I stop that trend? Or the growing number of peaceful protests against my rule?

There are three types of clinic I can build, what are the differences and when should I bother with the others?

Do I need roads to connect all of the buildings I have created, or are some fine without being connected to the island’s infrastructure?

It really does go on and on. It seems, from what I’ve seen, to be an incredibly complicated game. I just wish I knew what the hell I was doing without having to go to GameFaqs and read someone’s writing on roughly what the hell to do – a trainee dictator’s guide.

What I find even more baffling is that I managed to complete the first campaign mission even though I had no idea what was going on. The game isn’t punishing my complete lack of knowledge, or holding me back until I can demonstrate a suitable level of skill. I am a bit worried about moving on to the next island, to be honest.

Oh, and the text is ridiculously small. I think at Daylight Games I will also make sure everyone sits the correct distance away from their TVs, rather than with their noses pressed up against them.