self pimpage

A few projects that I've been involved with here recently have been released so I figured why not spread the Derek love today.

I did a podcast with Victor 'Dogface' Radliff the other night with Gootecks - a famous Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike player and now an up and comer in the world of SF4. You can find the podcast here. It was a lot of fun and hopefully you guys will find it fun as well. Note for those that visit my blog about videogame design and stuff - this is purely Street Fighter.

For those of you who do visit here for videogame design - then you may be interested in this:



This book written by Steven Swink can be found here at Amazon.


Steve came into LA a while back to interview me for the book - which talks about 'feel' in videogames, something that definitely piqued my interest. If you pick up the book and look at the book - I have this lovely quote:

"Steve has demystified what separates good games from great games, in a way that everyone can understand. Steve has written the very first book that deconstructs and examines the concept of why certain games feel better than others. Have you ever wondered why a simple action such as jump feels different in all video games? So has Steve, who has explored this and other actions to help everyone create better video games."

So go out there and support Ryan 'Gootecks' Gutierrez and Steve Swink since they are awesome people.

I <3 Castlevania

I finished my annual obsession with a new handheld castlevania game. Me and the other 200k people since these games barely sell. Sadness.

While a lot of people see it as one of the best 'metroidvanias, I'm not sure if I would call it that. I had a lot of fun for sure but something is definitely missing. For me it was the lack of exploring and backtracking. They decided to have a lot of smaller maps like how Portrait Of Ruin was - but some of the maps I ran through once and never went back.

Anyways, that's not what I wanted to talk about today. They have a couple of interesting mechanics, specifically for the more hardcore players. All of the bosses are really hard this time around. What makes them hard is simply how much damage they do to the player. They are all really pattern based - having 3 or 4 attacks at the most usually. With the limited number of attacks, the bosses become pretty easy to 'read' but one mistake and you are losing 1/4 of your health.

So the interesting thing is they built a mechanic where if you beat the boss without taking any damage then you get a 'medal' which is just a reward, does nothing but says you beat the boss without losing health. Sort of like an achievement. On top of this though, they give the player a ring called, 'The Death Ring' which boosts all of your stats (maybe even doubles them). The 'gimmick' of the ring is that if you are hit once, you die instantly.

After you beat the game, you are allowed to start the game over and keep all of your stuff (including this Death Ring). So you are able to achieve all the medals that you didn't obtain the first time through. So the game gives you this awesome ring - but one hit from the boss and you die. But you are trying to make it through the whole battle without being hit so it all works out.

There are a few other interesting things in the game (such as the character you play after you beat it) but I'm out of time this morning.

Tomb Raider Demo - oh how you broke my heart

I unfortunately don't have a lot of time but I want to talk about the Tomb Raider: Underworld demo real quick. It's a gorgeous game for the most part and I'm definitely going to pick it up when it comes out. I enjoyed Tomb Raider Legend and wasn't a huge fan of Anniversary but I managed to finish it nonetheless.

Tomb Raider has always been one of my favorite franchises and I was super excited when Crystal Dynamics took it over. That being said...there is one part of the demo that drove me nuts.

They introduce this new mechanic where you pick a stick up off the ground and they teach the player to look for holes in the wall (or columns) to place the stick in. Once placed - it becomes a horizontal pole that she can climb which lets you explore the environment more and move on to the next puzzle or whatever. This is a welcome addition and seems like it could open a lot of things up.

So step 1 in all of this - is seeing the stick on the ground. Step 2 is finding the proper place for it and Step 3 is putting it all together. Simple, clean and elegant.

After doing all that I climb up and around and find the same type of stick ALREADY placed in a hole. So naturally they teach the player to remove the stick and now Lara can walk around carrying the stick.

This is where Step 4 comes into play and this is what drove me nuts. Step 4 in ANY other videogame would be to remove the stick and find a new hole to place it into. So...I walked around for about 5 minutes looking for somewhere to place my new found stick. When Lara does any action such as jump she lets go of the stick. The worst part is that the stick has physics - so I'm up on this ledge, I let go of the stick and kick it off the ledge and immediately think, 'Oh no!! Now I have ruined the puzzle and must restart the game'.

Turns out...all the player has to do is remove the stick from the hole that it was in to solve the 'puzzle'. There was no step 4!! Maybe because it's a demo and perhaps the middle part of the game and none of this really has context but I really did wander for a good 5-10 minutes looking for that 2nd layer of the mechanics that were just taught to me.

Also - please tell the player what they have picked up. Again - this may just be a 'demo' thing but I picked up all sorts of things off the ground and she just put them in her backpack without ever telling me what they were.

More missing time

So I made a promise to myself to try to update this blog more often and boy have I sucked at keeping that promise. Some days I wonder if I should stop updating at all. Not sure what I'm getting out of it let alone you the reader. I guess I'll just babble and see where this post leads to.

Playing through Castlevania: Order of something or other on the DS right now. The DS is pretty much my favorite Next Gen system. Although I fucking lost mine on a plane trip here recently (with my coveted Soul Bubbles!). Thanks to an awesome person - they sent me a replacement. I was thinking about holding off and picking up that DSi thing - but that thing might as well be the Gameboy Color of DS's. Of course we all know what's going to happen - Nintendo is going to come up with some way of using the Camera in Animal Crossing and sell 9 million more units just like that.

Castlevania is pretty damn hard this time around. I'm a huge fan of the route that Castlevania has gone since Symphony Of The Night - the whole Metroidvania route. This one doesn't seem to have a whole lot of exploring to it which bums me out, but it's still fun - when I'm not using Magical Tickets to escape back to the village so I can heal myself.

I've been a traveling fool here lately. I've been in Madison, WI twice, Vancouver and Albany all within the last month or so. I have a stack of receipts scattered through out my laptop bag, bedroom and office that I need to collect and turn in. Anyone have a good method of keeping all that stuff organized? I definitely suck at it.

The trips were fun though - I always enjoy going to visit the fine folks at Raven (madison). Something about making videogames in the midwest speaks to me. Plus I get to see an old co-worker of mine, Gustavo. Vancouver was fun because I had never been there before. Visited Radical now that they are part of the huge Activision Blizzard umbrella or whatever. Super Super nice studio - the main meeting room is a log cabin. It's completely out of control. Albany was also a brand new city for me - super cold but a lot of fun as well. I can't remember what projects have and haven't been announced so I'll just shut up now.

I went to Universal Studios this year for their Halloween event. Wow - that place was amazing. Definitely hollywood level of makeup and gore combined with people jumping out and scaring me nonstop. There was one event where you take a tram to another part of the park and there is a huge plane crashed on the ground, broken in half, etc. Totally looked like the set of Lost or something.

I went to the 1st halloween screening of Dr.Horrible here in LA on halloween night. That was a lot of fun as well - Joss Whedon himself was there along with Nathan and Felicia Day; no Doogie Howser but what do you expect. The movie was subtitled so everyone could sing along - plus they sold a bag of random interactive items. These were really random things like little 'curtains' so the crowd could lift them up when Dr. Horrible says, '...you're curtains.' or some nonsense like that.

Oh yeah - started playing Dead Space (told you I was going to babble). Hrm...Need to play it some more to really form an opinion. The presentation is off the chart but I feel like I'm doing a lot of fetch quests so far which is getting a little annoying. I'm only on chapter 3 or 4 right now so hopefully it gets better.

I'm downloading the demo's for the new Tomb Raider and Mirror's Edge - I'll go check those out when I'm done updating.

Oh yeah - so a lot of games have been released (or about to) that I worked on the past year or so. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, Quantum of Solace and Guitar Hero: World Tour. Where to begin? Spider-Man seems to either click with people or not. Never been involved with a game that is all over the map as far as review scores are concerned. Usually they are super bad or decent.

All the games seem to suffer from a little nostalgia (Guitar Hero a little less but it's there) - Web of Shadows vs. Spider-Man 2 and Quantum vs. Goldeneye. In both instances (SM2 and Goldeneye) people seem to remember these games being perfect 10's or something. I'm not making excuses as I'm proud of both games but, damn - nostalgia is a motherfucker.

There is good stuff in both games and it will be interesting to see what happens with both.

Guitar Hero was definitely interesting. The only part I was involved with was multiplayer and it was interesting due to competing with Rock Band and trying our best to not straight up copy for fear of litigation. Now that the game is out - I see where a few mistakes were made and this is more of a mental reminder for myself to email some people on Monday. In all honesty though - both games (RB2 and GH4) have issues when it comes to multiplayer, both parts have good things but neither is perfect. Maybe next time out some issues can get ironed. But if you hate the multiplayer in GH4 then feel free to yell at me.

Let's see - I finished reading, 'The Art of Learning' by Josh Waitzkin. Josh is the main character in, 'Searching For Bobby Fischer' - the child chess phenom. He talks a lot about how when the movie came out - for a variety of reasons he lost interest in chess and took up a type of taiwanese martial arts. He then went on to become world champion in that as well. Discusses how he conquered both a mental game and a physical game and the process of learning both. Super interesting and I definitely recommend it. Although his writing gets worse as the book goes on IMO.

I think both demo's are finished so I'm going to go check those out.