Zippy Gamer

Rapture Rising Issue 5

Lewis Dunn — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:49:00 +0000

Issue 5 of Rapture Rising sees a change of tone.

How Gaming Can Change The World

Jonathan — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 22:53:15 +0000

People like to have fun. This is obvious. Games are a part of virtually every culture and gaming has the power to make the world a better place.

The Fun Theory

Not long ago I heard about The Fun Theory, which is simply brilliant. The idea of the fun theory is that having fun is a good way to change behavior. The web site challenges visitors to think of creative ways to improve the world by using the concept of fun.

We all know that taking the stairs is healthier than taking the elevator. The age of computers is causing more and more of us to sit on our asses all day. What if taking the stairs was more fun? Check out the video below:

Check out The Fun Theory web site for more videos.

Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal is a well known game designer who is working to encourage game designers to improve the world with their games. She claims that reality is broken and game designers can fix it!

In the 20-minute video below, McGonigal discusses gaming and how we could use it to solve real-world issues like hunger and poverty. Sounds crazy, right? Check out her fascinating talk:

Be sure to check out her web site as well. As McGonigal says, we need more epic wins!

DICE 2010: “Design Outside The Box”

In the video above, Jesse Schell of Schell Games gives a presentation on the future of gaming. This video is interesting because it shows how gaming has already changed the world and how we spend our money on games.

Games like Farmville and Wii Fit came out of nowhere and changed games as we know them. The possibility of earning Gaming Achievements has changed how gamers play their games.

Could our real-world lives be more successful if we acquired achievement points for performing certain tasks? The 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid explores this idea by having you grow a tree in the dashboard. The better gas mileage you get, the taller your tree grows.

Some teachers are already successfully using video games in their schools and UC Berkeley even taught a class using Starcraft.

How do you think gaming has changed the world?

Image attributions: featured banner, thumbnail

Funny Old Sega Ads [Adults Only]

Jonathan — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:43:32 +0000

Sega was the king of risqué adult video game ads back in the day. Let’s take a look at the top five.

Warning: These are not safe for work!

Sega gives a new meaning to “playing with your joystick.”

A classy reference to the “masturbating will make you go blind” myth.

Yeah, it’s somewhat common for those in the North to pee their name in the snow. Don’t ask me why.

This advertisement is nuts.

And finally, the best for last…

Probably the best advertisement for any video game, period.

Have you seen any other funny ads? Let us know about them in the comments below.

Goodbye to Xbox Live’s 1 vs. 100

Jonathan — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 01:53:00 +0000

The free game that so many of us loved, 1 vs. 100, has been canceled. It was just recently confirmed that there will be no third season for the popular Xbox Live title.

This is a shame, since it was arguably the best free game on the Xbox Live network and was a lot of fun to play with friends if you were in the mood for some relaxing and non-serious gaming. It was also a very unique experience, an online trivia game show with a live host and real prizes.

The developers plan to take the lessons they’ve learned from the development of 1 vs. 100 and apply it to future games.

We knew starting on this project, that 1 vs 100 was completely different and would be an idea we would continue to evolve. We’ve learned a lot from this experience and we’re committed to applying these lessons to the cool, new stuff we’re working on, but can’t yet discuss.

We’d like to thank them for the two seasons we had and we’re looking forward to seeing what’s next.

Single Player Games After the Honeymoon Period

Vulture — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:57:20 +0000

It’s happened to all of us: you buy a shiny new single player game, plunge into a well polished world, and are head over heels in love. This might very well be… the GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME. Sometime after you beat the game, however, you put it down, and never feel the urge to play it over again. Whenever you try and revisit the game, for some reason the reality just doesn’t match up to your rose colored memories.

Welcome to the honeymoon trap.

In most single player games while the second playthrough can never recapture the thrill of discovery and the novelty factor of the first playthough, if the game has good moment-to-moment gameplay that can be enough to keep you going beyond the honeymoon period. If it does not have quality moment to moment gameplay, its stock will drop like a rock on the second playthrough.

No game that I can think of illustrates this better than Batman: Arkham Asylum.

With really good single player experiences, the second playthrough reinforces my high opinion of the game in the first playthough– but with Batman AA I felt like the second playthrough exposed the lack of substance behind the shiny veneer of the first playthrough.

Don’t get me wrong, Batman Arkham Asylum is a really good game and is clearly the best Batman game ever (which is not saying a lot) — but it’s still overrated. However it’s not easy to see why until you make it past the honeymoon period of the first playthough.

A game needs some freedom/leeway in the gameplay to really keep bringing you back– and this is the main thing Batman AA is missing.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

JUMPING

In Super Mario Bros. basic jumping was fun because you completely control the height and direction of Mario’s jump and a mistake can kill you.

You can also do stuff like slick jumping turning hit the ground and slide type moves because of that leeway in the gameplay. And stuff like that is what keeps you coming back (and not the harrowing tale of rescue of the damsel in distress).

In Batman, if you want to jump over a ledge just hold ‘X’ and forward and Batman automatically runs toward the ledge and jumps over it perfectly every time — there’s no technique to employ– no timing, no lining up the jump, no skill necessary.

CLIMBING

Take a game like Infamous. When I climb a building there’s a million different ways to climb the same building (including wrong ways that can result in you falling all the way back to the bottom and thus making you pay attention) — I can climb up a ladder, shimmy across a ledge until I find a handhold to climb up, climb a pole, climb up windows, ect– thus climbing is fun.

In Batman, if I want to climb I need to find a designated spot that allows me to look at it and be prompted to press R1. When I press R1 and Batman shoots his grapple hook thing, he’s always going to climb up the same way– seen it once, seen it a million times.

Thus climbing in Batman is not fun– it’s not annoying either– but not fun– just meh. It’d be nice if there was more variety to it somehow (and/or if they found some other area of gameplay to flesh out to make up for this lost ground).

FIGHTING

In Batman AA, there are a lot of offensive attack moves that are “hotspot” oriented– ie. the vertical takedown, the crashing through the glass, the simplified fighting scheme– that reminds me of Def Jam: Fight for New York.

In Def Jam Fight for New York there was a bunch of “hot spots” (ie. if you press a certain button when the enemy is near a car you’ll do a prearranged sequence where you smash their head in the door of the car) — it was awesome the first time you see each hot spot move but it gets more and more boring and you yearn for the variety and complexity that earlier incarnations of the Def Jam engine (ie the AKI wrestling titles) had.

Likewise in Batman the fighting is fun but you eventually yearn for the added complexity of fighting in games like God of War and Ninja Gaiden.

To be fair, there’s plenty of variety in the gameplay itself, but the problem is the lack of any one gameplay mechanic that by itself is fun to do over and over. The fighting comes closest to this, but it’s not quite up to par with some other games.

To make an analogy– take MLB the Show. The default batting mechanic makes you as the batter have to locate the ball as well as time it to get a hit. If you want to make the game really easy to play so your little sister can play it, you can alter the settings so that all you have to do is press X at the right time– thus making it all timing and taking away the skill in recognizing pitch location.

In Batman, it’s like it’s set up for your little sister with the way that the reversals are all pure timing based (tap triangle and Batman does the rest, no matter where the enemy is), and the striking is all button mashing based. There’s a little bit of skill involved in fighting guys with knives or stun batons in that you need to either hit them with a batarang and then press R2 and triangle to ground and pound, or press x to jump over them and attack from behind, but that alone falls short of gameplay that would keep me coming back.

So a lot of things feel like auto-pilot (ie. the Batarang is auto-aim, reversals are all pure timing as I stated above, the jumping and climbing as stated above).

Like I’m playing Gran Turismo with all of the assists on– which is fine for people that like that, but I wish there was an option to turn these assists off.

It feels like the gameplay in this game is halfway between a game like KOTOR (where it looks like I’m really playing and swinging the lightsaber but I’m really just supervising) and games like Super Mario Bros and Infamous and Twisted Metal 2 and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (where I really am in full incremental micro level control and not just macro level control).

CONCLUSION

Too many single player games are like a disposable razor: use once and throw away. Granted, lots of games offer things like trophies, treasures, branching paths, ect, to give you a reason to come back and play again, but that stuff, while appreciated, only serves to kick the can down the road. The big factor that extends a game’s replay value indefinitely, the renewable resource you’re left with when the fossil fuels of story and presentation are exhausted, the thing that separates the games that come and go from the true classics is the gameplay. In Batman AA, the basic moment to moment gameplay isn’t enough by itself to keep the game entertaining– the greatness of the game really depends on the story and presentation and atmosphere (which all lose their novelty on the second playthough) combined with the deceptively shallow, automated gameplay (the shallowness of which becomes much more apparent after you’ve beaten the game).

All the most memorable stuff that happened in my experience with Batman AA was scripted– in a game with deep gameplay you should be able to create your own memories via creative stuff that the game allows you to do– and the prospect of creating new experiences like that on the fly is what keeps you coming back.

What I remember about Super Mario World was how much different stuff Mario could do with a turtle shell (ie. carry it around, kick it up in the air, kick it forward, have Yoshi eat it and gain powers, ect). It’s not the story that sticks out in my mind, it’s the gameplay, and how little things like playing with a shell were fun.

A mega hyped, shiny new video game is like a hot woman in a dark nightclub who starts sweet talking you while you’re drunk– you might be head over heels in love that night– but you don’t really know what you have until you see what you wake up next to in the morning.

Image credit: Tony J. Case

10 Reasons FIFA Should Be a Fighting Game

Jonathan — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 23:34:55 +0000

As I’ve watched the FIFA World Cup 2010 over the past few weeks, it became increasingly obvious to me that the sport should be represented in video games not only as a football/soccer game, but also as a fighting game.

Here are 10 images that explain why.

#1

Ouch. Congrats to Spain for winning the cup. You earned it.

(click the image above for the fun animated version)

#2

This guy can throw better than Ken and Ryu combined.

#3

Hey what’s over there?! PUNCH!

#4

Scientifically proven to increase back pain.

#5

Can you seen my new shoes?

#6

Practicing his hurdles.

#7

The knee just isn’t supposed to go there.

#8

How did this even happen?

#9

That’s gonna leave a mark!

#10

Perfect kick, yeah!

Bonus Animated GIF!

Sorry. I couldn’t resist.

You Meet The Nicest People Making Video Games

Jonathan — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:28:39 +0000

Video documentaries are one of my favorite ways to learn about something. Honestly, the Discovery Channel has taught me many things through documentaries that I would have never bothered learning about from a book.

Someone I know from the GameSpy forums is making his own video game documentary titled, You Meet The Nicest People Making Video Games.

Check out the trailer:

Here’s a message from the creator:

Hey, guys! It’s been awhile. A few months ago, I started work on this documentary. Everything I’ve done so far has been with equipment borrowed from a community center here in San Jose. After my first batch of interviews, I decided I’d like to go on the road and speak to some more people, and so I launched a page on Kickstarter to raise funds for this project. I’ll be traveling across the US and speaking to people who make videogames on their own time and dime and finding out what makes them tick. Part of my motivation for this is, as said by Anna Anthropy in the trailer above, to see more people making games.

I’ll be interviewing students and indie game makers and golden age veterans alike, and in the end, the movie will be given away freely under a creative commons license, and all equipment turned over to the community center that has enabled me to film as much as I have to this point, so please take a look at the page, kick in if you’re so inclined, and definitely spread the word so this movie gets made!

If you’d like to learn more about the project, check out his page.

Spirit Tracks: Final Boss Glitch

Joseppi — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:16:36 +0000

Since the early days, games have had glitches. Some are good, some are bad, and a few are just downright annoying! All gamers at one time or another have encountered a glitch while playing their favorite games. And Nintendo has had its fair share of glitched games since the beginning.

Probably the most famous glitch in video game history comes from Nintendo themselves. The original Super Mario Bros. is very well known for its Minus World glitch. This world is accessed by breaking a few bricks at the end of World 1-2 right above the exit pipe and jumping at just the right spot allowing you to go through the wall to the Warp Zone area. And if you just go down the first pipe without moving any further, you will be taken to the Minus World. This world is basically just a never-ending version of World 7-2, but the game calls it World -1, thus getting the title “The Minus World.”

Some people spend countless hours on games trying to exploit these unintentional little bugs to make a game more enjoyable. Some glitches can cause a player to cheat; such as The Spire Glitch in Metroid Prime Hunters which allows Spire to hide inside the wall in Alinos Gateway. This glitch is was a cheap but easy way to win the match back when the game first came out. But now, almost everyone knows about it, making it much harder to get away with.

One Nintendo franchise that is no stranger to glitches is The Legend of Zelda series. Ocarina of Time had many glitches that made the game that much more fun! Remember how you could turn any of your weapons into bottles? Sure, you end up losing most of those items for good, like I once did with my bombchus, but it’s still fun! And don’t forget the Unlimited Gold Skulltula glitch where you can keep going back and collecting the same Skulltula from the grotto by Hyrule Castle. All of those glitches, although unintentional, were just added bonuses to the game. And Twilight Princess is another prime example of Zelda glitches. I know people who have said that the most enjoyment they got out of that game was from exploiting its glitches. I can’t say that I’m one of them myself, but to each their own right?

But then there are the evil glitches. You know, the annoying little bugs that plague some of your favorite games. Well, today was the day I had the pleasure of encountering one myself. You may have heard of this happening before. Hell, maybe it’s even happened to you. But it is a very annoying glitch that will haunt Spirit Tracks players for years to come. I’m talking about the Stuck Behind Zelda glitch.

This pesky little bug is achieved while fighting the final boss, Malladus. By getting hit by one of his fireballs in just the right spot, you’ll be knocked back off the screen behind Zelda, leaving her and yourself helpless. Once this happens, all you can do is either die or restart the game. So when this happened to me, I pulled out my crappy old webcam and began recording. Here’s the video of how it all went down.

You can download the full version of the Song of Storms Remix here!

The artwork used in the video can be found here and here!

PC News from E3, Day 4

Kelsey — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:46:36 +0000

Battlestar Galactica MMO

The Battlestar Galactica MMO will be a browser-based MMO game. However, as Quake Live proved to players recently, this need not be alarming news. Quake Live, for those not in the know, is a free version of Quake 3: Arena is the original game played in one’s browser. Our browsers are no longer as limited as they used to be and the Battlestar MMO is more awe-inspiring than iD’s browser-based game. It seems to be much more influenced by EVE Online than Jumpgate Evolution. The game is controlled with the mouse and the player has direct control over their ship – it’s not a point and click interface as one may expect from a browser-based game like this.

The Battlestar MMO does not have a planned release yet.

Brink

Splash Damage, known for their multiplayer games (they developed the multiplayer components to Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom 3, in addition to developed Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars), is showing off some more Brink this year. This is a game that has flown under the radar for a few years – it always gets noticed but never gets a lot of attention. Splash Damage’s hope for Brink is for it to be a mix of single-player and multiplayer. Players will have persistent online characters. When a match starts, characters from the single-player campaign will be talking to the troops – the players (the screen will show the characters in the match, to boot) And the single-player mode feels like a logical extension of the multiplayer. Character customization is the name of the game, as completing objectives and killing characters will give players points to customize their character. Splash Damage’s Brink always seemed a bit ambitious; they’ve noted that there tends to be an issue with single player-focused titles having lackluster multiplayer modes and vice versa. I mean, who plays the single player mode for the Unreal games? They may play some matches against bots, but the dedicated single player campaign is lackluster. Likewise, I never found more than a handful of people willing to play Deus Ex online. Splash Damage hopes to remedy this by giving the multiplayer component qualities of single player games and the single player campaign have elements of multiplayer games.

Brink is dated for next spring.

Bulletstorm

Six years ago the studio, People Can Fly released their debut game, Painkiller. Painkiller was a return to basics for the FPS genre. Simple, uncomplicated story and hordes of enemies to kill. It may not have been groundbreaking, but it was a very refined shooter experience. Bulletstorm is the new shooter being developed by People Can Fly, but it’s a bit more advanced than Painkiller. In this new title, players shoot through legions of enemies, yes, but the player is rewarded with points for each kill. The points are based on how you kill an enemy. Get up close and personal for more points. Stylish kills garner even more points. The points are used to upgrade weapons and abilities. The hope is to encourage the players to use the environment and weapons creatively to get nice kills.

Bulletstorm is dated for February 22, 2011.

Badass

The Lord of the Rings Online

This E3 has been a wealth of information for MMOs. Turbine has taken the time to give more info on The Lord of the Rings Online’s move to the free-to-play model (which was announced prior to E3). We saw a similar move with Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online and it seems like we’ll see a lot of the same changes. The game itself will be free, but the players will be able to buy content and in-game items. Current subscribers will get free in-game currency to purchase this stuff, so it still pays to be a subscriber. This move was likely encouraged by the reaction to the D&DO community to this model – the amount of subscribers (known as VIPs in-game) doubled. The beta for the F2P LotRO started on the 16th.

Rock of Ages

ACE Team is currently known for Zeno Clash. Zeno Clash is a first-person fantasy game released on Steam that was a bit of a hit, both for its interesting art style and its gameplay. Rock of Ages is a tower defense game (remember when you just played tower defense games in Starcraft and Warcraft III? Who would have dreamt that these would become a full-fledged genre?) mixed with Marble Madness… yeah, I’m a bit confused too. Rock of Ages is a multiplayer game where players take turns trying to roll their rock into their opponent’s base. The game will have a variety of art styles, depending on the level.

Sadly, not much information is available on this interesting title – I couldn’t even find screenshots or access the official site as I wrote this. However, we can expect to be downloading Rock of Ages before the end of this year.

Ship Simulator Extremes

I have a soft spot for simulators. I’m no expert on this genre. And I do have a preference for the more science-fictiony attempts at simulators, but I can say that I do enjoy the World War 2 submarine simulator Silent Hunter II. There’s something about the slow, methodical gameplay that should be boring but is somehow thrilling. Ship Simulator Extremes is being published by Paradox Interactive, known for their somewhat dense (but never overwhelming) historical real-time strategy games. The developer,VSTEP Software, has made simulations for the government and corporate sectors in the past. Between the two, this game is in very good hands. The amount of content this game is going for is overwhelming, however. You can explore the ships you’re commanding, both large and small vessels, in detail. There are three planned campaigns. In the first you are the captain of a cruise ship, you have to not only navigate the waters, but keep the customers happy and find replacement parts for anything that breaks down. There’s also a Greenpeace campaign which takes place in the Antarctic as you seek out ships engaged in illegal whaling to stop them. The third one hasn’t been disclosed, which is odd considering it’s slated to be released sometimes this year (getting any accurate date is hard, sometime in August seems to be a safe bet).

Two Worlds II

Remember those all-too frequent ads for Two Worlds a few years ago? I couldn’t watch Seinfeld without seeing these ads at least 3 times and, with how much I watch Seinfeld in a day (when I have access to cable four episodes a day is the norm), I grew a bit annoyed with these ads. The original Two Worlds was not a critical darling, but Reality Pump is hoping that Two Worlds II will be a bit more warmly received. Which for me just requires them to air less ads for their product when I watch everyone’s favourite sitcom from the 90s. Two Worlds II is an RPG very much like the Elder Scrolls series – big, epic, and more than your fair share of combat. Two Worlds II boasts an open-ended development system for characters. The game plays more like an action game than your typical RPG, but that seems to be the trend of RPGs as of late. The game will also feature a multiplayer mode – one of the cooler aspects to this multiplayer mode is for the ability for players to create villages to produce goods for trade.

Expect to save the world and found your own modest village this September.

Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online

I’m a nerd, albeit a bit of a frugal one. I love the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It’s science-fiction enough for me to love the setting, but has enough fantasy elements to keep the fantasy nerd inside of me happy. However, collecting those little figures to fight other little figures is an expensive endeavour. The Warhammer 40k universe found its greatest video game success with Relic’s strategy games (I consider the original Dawn of War, and its expansions, to be the best RTS games ever, sadly I haven’t tried Dawn of War II yet). The developers of Warhammer 40k: Dark Millennium Online, Vigil Games, are a bit tight-lipped on this game. The trailer is obviously from the perspective of the Imperial forces in the game. Vehicles make an appearance, presumably they will be player controlled. And the scale of the game seems to be quite huge, with walkers towering over ground forces.

The combat system looks more like a shooter than an RPG. Perhaps we can expect something akin to Mass Effect or Fallout 3. Seeing as how this is set in the Warhammer 40k universe, we can expect a well-thought out and robust PvP. The developers are pretty quick to acknowledge, and distance themselves from, Relic’s efforts with the Warhammer 40k universe. This is not the tactical strategy experience we saw in Dawn of War or the balls-to-the-walls action game we’ll see from Relic’s upcoming Space Marine game; this is a roleplaying game. It’s not known which races will be playable. – Both Orks and Space Marines had their share of screen time in the trailer, but it is expected that all the races currently in the Warhammer 40k canon will make an appearance. Seeing who they make playable and how they handle balance will be interesting, as each side is designed with wargaming (not roleplaying) in mind. At the end of the day, my hope is to play as the Eldar and to engage in some territorial disputes with the Necrons – or if you want it in English, I want to be a space elf and fight space-robot-zombies!

Hopefully we’ll be burning heretics for the emperor in 2012.

Driver: San Francisco

little420247 — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:56:43 +0000

This week at E3, Ubisoft, the publisher of Driver, announced the release of Driver: San Francisco for fall 2010. The storyline starts where Driver 3 left off, with Tanner being shot by his adversary Jericho. Tanner then goes into a coma, in turn, he gains the ability to teleport from vehicle to vehicle. This new ability is called shifting, which seems to be an awesome concept.

Although Tanner has the ability to roam freely around the streets of San Francisco, this latest installment of Driver will focus on the movie style car chases. Reportedly, there will be upwards of 100 vehicles to chose from, and plenty of road to keep the chases flowing. There will also be a large amount of classic vehicles thrown into the action, and this should make for some never before seen chases.

This latest version of Driver will also include the option to play online. This mode will offer fans some pretty exiting chases as well. The screenshots from Driver: San Francisco detail some excellent graphics, and these new added features will offer some unbelievable game play. Driver: San Francisco will be available for Playstation 3, X-box 360, Wii, PC, and Mac.