Category: Audio&Games

Beat ‘em ups were and are my thing. I just think that the concept of going left to right beating people up is enjoyable and less brutal than first person shooting which is a good thing, probably? It’s relaxing, exhilarating, doesn’t demand a strong commitment in time or skills. That’s good entertainment.

I think that type of game would be great in lots of ways these days: a beat ‘em up where you go after cat-callers and rapists a beat ‘em up where you play the new Ghostbuster cast, a beat ‘em up where you punch politicians in the face before escaping the white house I mean, the list is endless.

I was there when they were popular in the arcades. A few notes on what they need to have in order to become a classic.

CAST

Look at Battle Circuit, the last Capcom beat ‘em up in 1997: you can play a woman in leotard, a Fantastic Four looking skinny dude, a carnivorous plant, a little girl riding an ostrich and a cyberdude. Maybe that’s a little extreme but you get the point, representation and diversity are important because it makes your potential audience happy. Don’t just have a dude and dudette, with the dudette being “fast” and the dude “strong”. We’re way passed that. Mix it up and go nuts on character design.

AESTHETICS

The beat ‘em up golden age is the 90s. 16bit graphics, 4096 colors. So I’m always kind of annoyed when I see that most beat ‘em all avoid that style for another “8bitHD” style, monochromatic and sad. The 16bit, Paul Robertson style is where it’s at. Bring me some colors, bring me some dynamic.

Audio is insanely important. Punches and kicks need to make you smile and feel like you’re actively beating the fuck out of those punks. Streets of Rage does beat ‘em up sound effects admirably. You need that high pitched, slap sound. That’s the feel good, hilarious, crucial part (Castle Crashers lets you abuse the slap sound as much as possible). SMACK THAT BITCH UP. Mid 90s is when we started getting sampled voices everywhere, so you would end up in a satisfying flow of punch and whoosh sounds, short screams and other digitalized cues with a punchy soundtrack that all together made the experience what it was. You need those whoosh sounds when you’re not hitting anybody, it helps solidifying the experience. Mother Russia Bleeds fails quite hard on the sound side when it could elevate that game soooo much.

DIFFICULTY

It has to be perfectly possible to beat the game on easy almost first try. It’s about having fun, not about spending hours you guys. Once again Streets of Rage and Castle Crashers do that perfectly –and that’s really hard to do- you can beat the game on easy or ruin your fingers on hardest. Health bars on all enemies is an awesome convention because it discreetly teaches you how to optimize your moves to get rid of them: two punches and a head butt or one uppercut and a kick in the face? And of course on bosses, it makes you realize how long it’s going to take, as well as putting pressure on you once you know you’re about to win. Not giving that precious feedback to players to force them to be as perfect as possible regardless is bad design. I don’t play beat ‘em up for a damn score or “be the perfect beast”, I play them to have a good time.

IT’S NOT THAT DEEP

I think beat ‘em ups can be serious in the theming –if you want to- but must use some kind of comedy in the delivery. I mean, it’s like any entertainment: violence is fine but you have to justify, wrap it into something that makes it less about just violence. I’d love to play a beat ‘em up where the plot is just you and your friends going to the beach and you end up in a riot beating up cops, rioters, scientologists and priests, destroying SUVs and fixies, sucker punching idiots on their phones, trying to go through to get there before sunset. The end would be like Inside’s end and that game would be the shit.

Beat ‘em ups could be so many things.

Have you listen to the UI sounds? Pretty great aren’t they.

That’s the screen that kind of killed the suspension of disbelief for me. Spaceports that are going to be empty as hell and way, way too clean. Forever. And stairs that people take once before they remember that they pack jetpacks. And of course the same four different crates you found everywhere.

I compared a lot NMS to Rebel Galaxy design-wise. How Rebel Galaxy did the spaceport thing? Interface only, no cumbersome walking or weird maneuvers to do in order to simply sell or buy things through a menu. RB still has 3D characters to talk to and ask stuff but the way they did it is smart. They keep your “flow”. They strip the game off everything that is kind of a boring task to do.

Both are space exploration games but in NMS you don’t really have a direct purpose to mining and stealing, destroying things from planets. In RB you have a purpose: you pilot a ship, you make money with it and you can choose to be a law-abiding citizen or a pirate or both.

It’s interesting to me that those small design decisions make RB fantastic and NMS feel hollow. NMS is immensely large but in today’s world it doesn’t really matter no one has the time to spend hundreds of hours on one game. It’s pretty rare. I didn’t finish RB and it’s probably a hundred times smaller.

Both are independent games made by small teams. But NMS is going to probably make a lot, a lot more thanks to a trailer that set all expectations all the way up and sold people on the game (RPS has a good article on that). I don’t think playing the hype game is worth it in the long term but Hello Games and Sony are printing money right now so, I don’t know.

Keirsey Temperament	Bartle Type	GNS Theory	Problem-Solving Style	Game example
Artisan	Killer	Experientialist	Power	GTA
Guardian	Achiever	Gamist	Persistence	Pokémon
Rational	Explorer	Simulationist	Perception	Half-life
Idealist	Socializer	Narrativist	Persuasion	WoW

Jesus the hype is on, init? Not even a week.

I summoned this old table from an old blog post because well, it’s still pretty good. I could make a better matrix adding Myers-Briggs indicators but you get the point.

So Pokémon is all about the guardian type which is according to Keirsey’s:

As Concrete Cooperators, Guardians speak mostly of their duties and responsibilities, of what they can keep an eye on and take good care of, and they’re careful to obey the laws, follow the rules, and respect the rights of others.

Wikipedia’s definition:

Guardians are concrete and organized (scheduled). Seeking security and belonging, they are concerned with responsibility and duty. Their greatest strength is logistics. They excel at organizing, facilitating, checking, and supporting.

Duties of training your little monsters, responsibilities of the gym, hatching eggs etc. It’s a type of gameplay that works for some people! A lot of people. Tons of kids. Of course! The problem solving style for guardians –persistence- is the one that requires the less skills making this barrier of entry a non-issue.

Personally the guardian type of play looks exactly like what we do for work so I’m not attracted to that. But it doesn’t matter if you’re 39 and you find that type of challenge fun and engaging. Don’t tell me that it’s great because people go out though: if you need a small screen to look around so that you walk around, from any angle this sounds sad to me because self-sufficiency and resilience are precious but hey, whatever.

Games are a matter of taste as much as any other entertainment. We live in the tyranny of the majority though so people feel like they have to play the game. You don’t have to, it’s not that deep even though virtual worlds have real life consequences. Let’s see how it goes in 6 months.

What do I like? I am into rational type of play, how surprising.

As Abstract Utilitarians, Rationals speak mostly of what new problems intrigue them and what new solutions they envision, and always pragmatic, they act as efficiently as possible to achieve their objectives, ignoring arbitrary rules and conventions if need be.

Wikipedia’s:

Rationals are abstract and objective. Seeking mastery and self-control, they are concerned with their own knowledge and competence. Their greatest strength is strategy. They excel in any kind of logical investigation such as engineering, conceptualizing, theorizing, and coordinating.

This so me. I always feel kind of guilty ignoring arbitrary rules but I really dislike them. I think I like to disregard them so that I can make up my own mind. Games based on that temperament are kind of rare to come by on mobile. It’s too demanding, in many ways. All good, only playing computer games at home isn’t a bad thing.

A lot of people get lost in this rational temperament (the “what do I do now?” feeling in first person exploration games for instance).

To Each His Own.

On Mighty N°9, via Rock Paper Shotgun:

First among them is the unwelcome inheritance of instant-death spikes on floors and walls, alongside many other environmental one-hit fatalities. The tiniest misjudgement or unfamiliarity around these things means instant death, and the frustration is because you have a positively archaic three lives and no continues per stage. It feels almost an affront, in an age where games save progress constantly, to be sent back to the start of the level to try again.

He continues:

At which point you have to acknowledge that this is a design choice, made thanks to nostalgia for a specific kind of challenge. And indeed some long-dormant region of my brain seemed to briefly stir, enjoying how easy it was to breeze through a level’s early challenges again, remembering to get a missed powerup, or take another route.

It really comes down to user experience and design going frontal against nostalgia and the trap of thinking that the past was really good.

It was not perfect, instant-death and boss battles were simply a design trend in the 80s because game designers were creating a lot of arcade games where the focus is to make you put more coins in the machine, thus hardcore difficulty and boss battles that you have to remember perfectly.

So playing Mega man was frustrating already at that time because it was super hard and it seemed kind of dumb because we were sitting in front of the TV in the living room, not standing in the arcade. Game’s style was so dope though. Fast forward to today where there are billions of new games each month, and we are more busy in our lives and I see how this design choice in MN9 still feels dumb.

However, and this is where things get interesting as the brain loves to grok when you go through something challenging, you will feel good. It’s not that it’s good game design, it’s just chemicals. But you will think, like a lot of gamers who can spend 5 hours straight beating a game that it’s a good game. Even if it’s flawed and that we know why (arcade influence).

Regardless of the type of game you’re building, I think being able to convey your game ideas, game designs without being brutal *while* being challenging is pretty much our main task. Which comes down to fairness to the player VS our systems. Example: instant-death on spikes is unfair and not consistent with the rest. Instant-death in Counter Strike is never, never unfair. Even when you’re a noob, you know or will know that you messed up.

That player’s feeling, happy and humbled and eager at the same time is really, really hard to convey and maintain. But when it happens bye here you go 200+ hours I’m coming!

Well,

Handhelds are definitely dead and for kids before they get phones and need laptops.

VR is in this super weird spot: expensive devices around, technology mostly working but not perfectly for everybody, and business-wise studios pretty much have to be financed by VR manufacturers because outside developers out there, I don’t think anyone bought a VR headset for the lulz in 2016 except for a bunch of enthusiasts. Manufacturers subsidies mean exclusivity which means more fragmentation and an artificial market… We’ll have 11 different VR headsets on the market soon. Yup.

What annoys me the most is to see critical advices not being followed: Jesse Schell is THE VR specialist, he said multiple times that headsets need 90 fps otherwise motion sickness happens real quick. Sony is about to ship a headset that doesn’t do 90 fps. Jesse said multiple times sound design is extremely beneficial to VR experiences. I have seen far too many demos and proof of concept with the most basic audio, it’s insulting.

Also, Magic Leap. Man that AR/MR thing just feels like the real deal. The last demo is very impressive. Not here yet though.

It’s impressive how crunch is never ever mentioned during E3 –not even as a joke-  even though organizations are so eager at GDC to talk about how it should never happen. Tell that to the Last Guardian team and gazillion others, I’m sure they’ll agree.

Zelda as main protagonist and the “what would Link be doing?” question couldn’t illustrate game conservatism more. It’s 2016 and that kind of stuff is frustrating. But it doesn’t matter Zelda was apparently the star of the week and Nintendo is about to play it safe and true to a 30 year old legacy. The usual.

Musically besides the little part in Watchdogs 2 with some refreshing classic everything is kind of the same vibe: epic orchestra and whiny pop music. And they all sound the same, exciting and extremely predictable. So it’s like eating pasta, basically.

So many things to get better at, folks.

Apparently, people have been asking for a story mode in Street Fighter V and I can’t believe I just wrote this, in a way.

Street fighter’s story is not a story it’s a setting: there’s a championship with all the best fighters in the world and you are one and you need to go at the top. The way SFII was dealing with fighters stories was perfect: it gave us a quick look at the possible reasons of a fighter entering competition once you won it all. We all understood that the story was an excuse to throw punches and kicks.

Here’s SFV story:

“Seven “Black Moons” are deployed by Shadaloo, granting M. Bison unimaginable power and enveloping the earth in total darkness. Seeing the moons mysteriously appear in the sky, Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li embark on an epic journey around the world to retrieve fragment pieces that are the key to stopping the “Black Moons” before it’s too late. Along the way, they encounter the rest of the World Warriors, each of whom have their own agendas and motivations in mind. The final battle between good and evil begins now… who will RISE UP?”

It’s beyond corny and overdone. It’s made for the fans who demanded that story mode. And that’s where it’s interesting in the relationship between developers and fans.

I don’t think we should give them what they want all the time. It feels like we’re parents stressing out with crying kids asking for that candy and we finally cave in, make him happy but in the end it’s still a shitty candy that the kid didn’t need and didn’t even care about as much as he was expressing how much he wanted it.

That story mode is exactly that. The problem is that candy is costly as hell and Capcom is probably trying to make it as cheap as possible (it’s free DLC) so, no one will be happy.

In the end caving in for fans makes financial sense. But this thirst for having everything explained and edited and movie-fied that people have is weird to me like, people are too tired to use their imagination and play with it?

Or more likely, there’s an entire generation that doesn’t feel comfortable at all with scarcity of anything and will just demand to obtain what they want.

The Wii, man. Announced ten years ago this week, it hurts my senses.

When I think about it it was so unprecedented and has never been replicated. The hype was monstrous. It was so great to work on it at that time –playing with it six months before the public- and how much people were excited (contrast with way, way superior technology like VR where people are just like “cool”). I had to fight to get one for my little sister. Pure madness.

Three years after its 2006 launch, the Wii was selling more than the PS360 combined in December. That’s nuts.

Ten years later the Wii U is such a disaster that I haven’t had the opportunity to play it once.

What if the Wii had been created to actually cement a blue ocean of games instead of just being a money printing machine for Nintendo after a disappointing GameCube business? It would have been cool I think, let’s see what was missing.

HD

I’m not speaking of raw power but come on big N: at least hdmi output. The entire TV market was switching to digital in/outs and Nintendo was like “nah we cheap and profitable, no digital output”. Which made the Wii a pain in the ass to plug to brand new flat TVs. That probably killed its lifespan more than anything else.

Of course more CPU/GPU power would have been welcome too. It was underpowered but that wasn’t necessarily an issue for tons of games. The Wii’s feature is/was its controller it would have been easy to keep making more powerful consoles down the road. They did just that with the 3DS. Weird.

WiiMotion+

Yesterday I was listening to a 25 year old basketball player – aka the core market- straight up saying that old school controllers are awesome because “you don’t have 16 buttons to memorize”. The wiimote, answered that and then added a piece of tech to make it better. That should have been integrated in the first place. Or at least not make it an extension but switch to Wiimote with built-in Motion+ tech ASAP and encourage developers to make stuff for it. Make it compatible with Windows even. I still think the Wiimote is one of the best controller ever. I miss it. I’ll never forget playing with the entire family, the only one time it ever happened.

Virtual Console

It’s the kind of shit… Nintendon’t do online well amirite. They just needed to release everything we played on 8/16bit, ASAP. That’s it. That and make the process to make games for that channel much more easier for indies. With those two changes it would have exploded in popularity, probably reaching Steam levels if not going further.

If those three points had been taken care of, ready for the future, we would still be swinging da ‘mote.

Independent game development was about professionals making a living making games without the constraint of dealing with a publisher, that relationship being more often than not abusive.

Independent game development became “indie” games, a nostalgia-induced aesthetic both built by small teams of professionals and amateurs. Making a living making games –which is what game developers describe as “being able to make another game”- became optional.

It’s disappointing that we keep forgetting about sustainability in this business. When even to this day really good, experienced game developers with all the privilege required –aka money- barely break even with their games when we never had more players playing games. It is a big big issue.

We need cheat codes at this point.

I was having this little conversation on Twitter with Megan Fox (not that one you idiot) about ageism and an aging gaming population. I think I am a good sample as the average age for a gamer has been basically following me for a decade (late gen X seems to be the cursor for average gamer age, which makes sense).

Right now according to the last statistics I saw, the average age is 35 for men and 43 for women. Developers though still aim at a much younger market as they always did because it’s the age bracket –the 20s- where people spend most of their time consuming/buying games. But let’s dig into the data a bit more:

Millennials right now represent the biggest slice of population. My generation, gen X, is the smallest slice of the adult/workforce/consumer part (between 20 to 60) as you can see below:

At 3.1% of the population for both men and women, that’s not much. What’s that bump at 50 though?

That’s 7% of the population. That’s 22M+ people. If you can sell your game to half that number, you’re doing fine.

So right now, the 20-35 represent 21% of the population, the 35-50 18.9%, the 50-60 19.9% and 60-70 a good 14.8%.

So what developers do? They focus on that “big” 21% and forget that 38.8% of the population (35 to 60) has money and likes games. No one is really making games for us. And if I add the 14.8% of the 60-70 bracket, we’re talking about a quite staggering 53.6% of the population right now who doesn’t feel like the game industry is talking to them.

Wow.

So how to cater to that growing population? Because this is what we have to offer right now:

Those games don’t click with older people. We have played those. We almost have three decades of experience playing those. That’s a long time. Here are points that I think you should consider if you want to aim at that juicy 38 to 53% of the population in the near future:

Older people don’t have time anymore

We have lives, things to do, kids to feed bills to pay etc. Give us small chunks of gameplay, things we can finish in a couple hours. It’s fine. We spent our 20s with hundreds of hours playing games. So don’t try to artificially up the difficulty. Don’t make us grind, don’t give us bosses, we have real ones to deal with. Your game will be fine without bosses, spend that extra time to flesh out a new mechanic or apply a bit more polish instead. We love those. Respect our time by giving us a good time, not frustration and infinite repetition. Adr1ft seems to be a game that goes in the right direction, offering a maybe short experience but one that you don’t forget. Oxenfree is around 5 hours long with excellent, “mature” (meaning on par with other entertainment) dialog. They’re on my wishlist. Kentucky Route Zero does it perfectly too.

Older people don’t have twitch reflexes anymore

Especially you. Just kidding but you know what I mean. Frame-accurate synchronization on 16 buttons gamepads is not making us happy. That’s why we play on computers too. We’re good at using those because of all those TPS reports we have typed. I still love playing Counter Strike but it’s really hard against those young aim bots. I was enjoying Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet –Metroidvania- and then I had a boss that requires perfect, fast moves. Tried for a while. I could do it but I didn’t care enough. See first point.

Older people love “chill” co-op

You know the kind. One player plays and the other helps out, without crazy tension or excitement. It’s not necessarily an older people behavior but I think we like it even more getting older. People do it with all those 60+ hours Tomb Raider-like games but like I said, we have seen those two billion times already. We need new settings, new themes, new heroines and ditch our stereotyped canvas a bit. Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime does it well but I suspect developers wanted to cater to hardcore gamers. Co-op but not chill co-op.

Older people have a broader culture than you

That’s the cool thing about aging, you get all those experiences and now you know more! It’s a little bit always the “been there, done that” argument but seriously, we did go and did that: Heroic Fantasy, Sci Fi and WWII war. A lot, probably too much. We need more themes. Invisible Inc brought some fresh spy-like, Batman the animated series-looking game to the masses and did well. Just a bit of difference makes all the differences!

I am certain that some game genres would be super successful to some people if they could up their aesthetic game. I see XCOM 2 as a very interesting game to play but it looks far, far too generic. Those 90s aliens are… Depressing as hell there, I said it.

I picture a XCOM 2 game in a Shameless/Weeds/Breaking Bad setting and I’m sure it would interest far more people than a generic alien taking over the world theme does. I think game developers abuse a bit too much escapism. We are older, we don’t need that. Actually we are more interested if it has some kind of connection with the real world. Give me a game where I need to be careful controlling a mecha in a city. Where is my game about crashing drones into monuments? Where is my Empire game where I build a hip-hop empire and screw artists? Give me an Assassin’s Creed type of game in 80s Lebanon with a simple yet lovely love story.  Don’t try so hard to outplay linear entertainment! Just make me have a good time by giving me something fresh yet familiar. Explore things most mediums haven’t. You have all the latitude.

You know what they say: if you build it, they will come.

Older people like all kinds of aesthetics: which is why I have an issue with cuteness: I am going to be 37 this year and I’m sick of cuteness. It bothers me. It’s a cop-out. I know perfectly why it works –everyone goes “aww” and forgets what it could be- but yeah, decades of cute made me stabby. The Witness is a perfect example of a “cute” game that is appealing to me aesthetically. It feels grown up. Thimbleweed Park looks cute but the theme and dark humor are totally shifting the comic book feeling. I want more of that.

Older people pay and don’t ask questions

I will buy your game if I want to. Put a decent price, that’s it! Older people won’t write on forums about how two twenties are too much for a game that took seven years in the making. We have shit to do and we know that things cost money. Developers have totally forgotten how PopCap used to make a killing selling puzzle games at $20 a pop to older people. That’s how they grew from 3 people to 400 and did well for the past 16 years like no other studio: by selling games to older people who won’t threatened to kill you if you don’t give them a refund. Older people are cool as fuck. Plus, we have all the money.

Now give me games! (it’s changing, I know. Firewatch is the next one this year)