GDC and God of War ramblings

GDC has come and gone this year. And for the 10th billionth time I have not gone. I suppose it's a weak excuse but it just happens to be at a bad time of the year, right before E3. With so much going on for E3 I feel guilty taking time off for GDC. Oh well.

Before GDC we had some amazing people stop by the studio - the Shadow of the Colossus team! I got up to get something to drink and all of a sudden saw 20 Japanese people in the kitchen. I said good morning to one of them in Japanese and all of a sudden they thought I spoke Japanese and started speaking back. My bad. I quickly said I don't speak Japanese (muri!) and went back to my desk. Later on in the day, Cory Barlog brought over the whole team to check out what we are doing with God of War 2. Figuring I would have a little fun with them - I took a script that we have to scale characters in real time (we used it with the Cerberus puppy transforming into the adult in part 1) and applied it to the skeleton creature. I scaled him 15 times bigger over the course of a few frames. Fumito Ueda asked me what I was doing and I told him we were making our own Shadow of the Colossus. Everyone laughed. It was really amazing to meet all of them and I wish I could have had longer to talk. The translator said how everyone was a big fan of God of War and I told him that all of us were big fans of Ico/SotC also and asked if I could take some pics:


Don't hate on american cell phone quality.

Anyways...There was a lot of cool stuff regarding God of War at GDC this year. Part 2 got announced!! If you haven't seen the bootleg video showing the trailer and the crowd reaction, make sure to check it out!



Tim Moss, the lead programmer for God of War, gave a really excellent speech about how the programmers came to grips with what the designers were requesting and how both camps came to work well with one another. For those of you who didn't make it to GDC, it looks like they have made his power point presentation available here (I think it's around 5mb or so).

Looks like David Jaffe and Lorne Lanning got together at GDC to talk a little bit about GOW also. Again for those of you who couldn't make it - looks like IGN transcribed it here.

Finally - if you guys haven't seen this video - you need to download it now. A blind kid goes to Japan to play Mortal Kombat against some of the worlds best fighting game players of all time. I'm talking about Chibita, Nuki, Kenbou, Tokido, KSK, etc. He plays 25 matches and only loses 3. Insanity. I put it up on yousendit for now so first come first serve. Click here to download it.

EDIT: I heard the url died so you guys might be able to try another one here

P.S. If anyone has a copy of Brain Training from GDC and doesn't want it - kick down! ^_^

Five Fighting Games - Part 2

The previous article we talked about the 5 most successful games - ok it was mostly me talking. This time I'm going to talk about the 5 most accessible fighting games.

With the success series we had a lot of great stories where people gave out their secrets to what they did to play these games. This time lets see if we can get any good stories about people you thought you would NEVER play against - simply because these games were so accessible everyone was playing them.

I remember one time when MK2 was popular, I had about 50 some wins and it was the middle of winter. To say that the arcade I was in was ghetto would not even begin to describe it. The places I went to play fighting games amazes me even to this day. Anyways I had a good win streak going when a new guy walked up with a big ass Starter jacket on. He opened it up and showed me the gun he had hanging out of his jeans and was all, 'so I'm going to win next right?' Of course he won and all of his boys laughed at me.

5 most accessible fighting games of all time:

A. Street Fighter 2: World Warrior. Being the one that started it all, people were drawn into the world of Street Fighter easily. It had a cast of cool characters that people wanted to play along with a list of special moves that people wanted to master. Taking the time to practice and learn everything the game gave you no longer applied to beating someone's score or anything, you could now defeat the person that was standing next to you and force someone else to spend their money trying to beat you. The adrenalin rush was something everyone was addicted to at the time.

B. Mortal Kombat 1. Mortal Kombat came out right around the time that Capcom started releasing sequel after sequel. By this point, the divisions between master and beginner in Street Fighter were drawn and drawn deeply. MK gave people an easy way out, if you weren't good in Street Fighter then go try your hand at Mortal Kombat! Combining this fact with the easy to perform moves and the eye candy at the end, people flocked to MK to rip off all of their opponent's heads.

C. Tekken. People grown tired of 2D fighting and the limitations on it, saw a new world to try to conquer when Tekken came out. Tekken requiring different skills than were necessary in traditional 2D fighting games, saw their chance to rise to the ranks of masters in this new world. Combined with the fact that just by pressing buttons, different moves came out, people quickly dropped SF and MK to try to master Tekken.

D. Soul Calibur. Building upon the success of Tekken, Namco developed a weapon based fighter known as Soul Calibur. With the Sega Dreamcast just having been released, Namco brought home one of the most beautiful conversions from arcade to home ever. Populated with mini games and missions for the player to win and achieve, people around the world couldn't stop talking about how great of a game Soul Calibur was.

E. Xmen Vs. Street Fighter. Combining two of the biggest franchises of the 90's - Street Fighter and Xmen comics, Capcom created a game that anyone could approach and see results. Fireball+2 punch buttons resulted in 30 hits for some characters!!! By dumbing down motions and upping the number of hits for moves, people were playing this game in arcades for years.

GOW2 gets announced

Fuck EB and the videogame industry

There are 2 things I truly hate about the videogame Industry: EB Games and Tuesday.

Me and my co-worker, Eric walked into an EB the other day and were horrified at what we saw. Nothing but horrible looking yellow boxes, stickers and a collection of games that were in no order what so ever.

I wanted to look for Stubbs: The Zombie and I couldn't even truly figure out where 'S' started and ended. I'm not even sure if I was in the Xbox section - the sign said so but the games on the shelf didn't.

Thats just the beginning of my hatred for that damn place. I bought a copy of Eternal Darkness from there a little while ago and this is what I came home with. I'm not sure if you can tell from this pic or not, but there are actually TWO get 10% off today stickers - one on top of the other one. And no, I didn't get 20% off. Hookers.

What I hate even more than that damn horrible place is Release Dates. I thought about buying Tetris and decided to see when it came out. According to this page on EB it says it ships on Monday. Does that mean I can buy it on Tuesday? Wednesday? If you continue to look at what else is coming out this week - they all ship on different dates!?!?!

If you have ever bought a cd or dvd recently, you know that new releases come out on Tuesday. Each new Tuesday the shopper can go into Best Buy or whatever store and pick up what they are looking for. But NOT for videogames! On Tuesday I might get Tetris but if I want Katamari for PSP I have to wait until...Thursday maybe? I just have to randomly visit the store hoping they have it in stock.

Which brings me to another thing I hate about the videogame industry: Pre-Orders! I really don't enjoy having to tell someone that I want a certain game and paying money in advance for it. If the videogame industry could get their act straight and let me pick up the game on Tuesday like every other form of media we wouldn't have this problem.

Five Fighting Games - Part 1

Decided to throw up a series discussing fighting games. I figured I would pick the 5 most successful, accessible and complex fighting games of all time. Today will be the most successful.

Seeing as how we are talking about the most successful fighting games, I'm curious if anyone has some great stories about things that they did as a kid to play them. I had a friend who would go through the mall parking lot pulling up on car handles looking for cars that were unlocked and seeing if there was any change to steal just to play Street Fighter. I remember trading copies of games (old sierra games) with the local guy who worked at my arcade for all of the foreign tokens (tokens that were for a different arcade that people tried to use in that arcade).

5 most successful fighting games of all time:

A. Street Fighter 2: World Warrior. Often heralded as the 2nd Pac-Man, Capcom quietly released a bomb into the arcades in early 1991 that rescued arcades and revolutionized the world. Names such as Chun Li and Blanka are now household names that everyone is familiar with. Capcom succeeded where others had failed for three reasons. One is that for the first time teenage males had something to compete with besides just score or time, they had one another. Second is that for the first time someone came up with a way to read in complex joystick motions correctly. Attacks went from just being a button or a direction and a button to now Down, Down/Toward, Toward+Punch (known through out the world as the fireball motion). People were given a new skill to attain and everyone across the world wanted to be the first ones to master these new skills and use them to win. Third, whether by design or by chance, Street Fighter succeeded because there was never one strategy that dominated the game. As soon as you thought you had found the perfect strategy to win with your character, there was someone there to prove you wrong.

B. Mortal Kombat 2: In the harsh weather known as Chicago, 2 guys were busy trying to get in on the craze that were fighting games. After having decent success with Mortal Kombat 1 - nothing more than an experiment with gore and real actors for their graphics, Midway did the unthinkable and actually injected some game play into MK2. Characters had actual strategies to employ and tier rankings were formed. The success of MK1 was largely in part due to the 'sekrets' that the game had (fatalaties, hidden character) and Midway created with MK2 with this in mind. Even going as far as releasing upgrades that changed the commands of not only some moves but also all of the fatalaties that were in the game. It was not uncommon to see players in the arcades with towels or even boxes over their hands to hide their inputs from fellow players. Midway seemed to be in tune exactly with what the players wanted at this time and delivered in full force.

C. Tekken 3. After having lived as nothing more than a shadow of Virtua Fighter, Tekken grew wings and sprouted into a franchise that no one could touch when Tekken 3 was released. People were tired of playing Street Fighter rehashes and Mortal Kombat became too silly, when along came Sony touting how 2D was dead and 3D was the future, and in walked Tekken 3 to prove that the future was here. Building upon precepts that people were familiar with, Tekken 3 learned from its mistakes and nailed the magic that is making a game that looks easy to play and provides years of depth. Having a story line that affected the characters throughout the series, having chars that were time released, having home releases that were often better than their arcade counter parts all added up for Tekken dominating the console sales figures for years to come.

D. Killer Instinct 1. After seeing that Midway could put a dent into the armor of Capcom's Street Fighter, Nintendo and Rare teamed up to carve out their slice of the fighting game pie. Once again, building upon the concepts that everyone were familiar with (6 buttons, 1 joystick), Killer Instinct came out brawling and succeeded. Boasting high resolution 3d models that were using the Ultra 64 hardware, (along with advertisements of how it was coming home to the Ultra 64 hardware) Rare knocked a home run with it's easy to perform combos and ease of play. Prior to KI, 4 hit combos were seen as the echelon of combos where as KI introduced a complex system that resulted in the player being able to use different subsets to create 40+ hits. Also since Rare were a UK company, they used what was then a burgeoning soundtrack of electronic dance music and introduced many Americans their first taste of quality techno music.

E. Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. Fighting game companies having alienated most fighting game fans by sequels that no one could understand the differences or were too complex that required people to read 100 page manuals written in Japanese, Capcom released a gigaton bomb on the fighting game community with Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. This was a new Street Fighter for a new generation - people were no longer settling for one on one and Capcom answered with the first real team based game that consisted of 3 players per team and could have potentially all 6 characters on the screen at once. By using a cast of 56 characters, mostly from previous titles - anyone who had ever come into contact with a Marvel comics book or a Street Fighter game prior would recognize half of the cast. Capcom once again pulled out their magic and created a game that is easy to get into and at the same time leaves enough room for talent and skill to be blossom. Released in 2000, this game has celebrated more tournaments and bigger tournaments than any other fighting game in the history of the US.

Honorable Mention:

Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting. Capcom knew they had a goldmine with Street Fighter 2 and wanted to cater to their fans. America at this time was the bulk of their audience, being more competitive by nature than Japan. With that in mind, they also wanted to provide an upgrade to counter the bootleg versions of Street Fighter 2 that were floating around. So Capcom of USA brought in 2 of their employees and asked them to fine tune what was already there. Possessing not one single frame of new animation, they took what they had and produced arguably the best version of Street Fighter 2 to date. Fans quickly flocked to the tweaks in droves and once again reminded everyone in the world why Capcom was #1 at this point.

Virtua Fighter - genius or insanity?

"If we ever wanted to do an online fighting game, it would have to be called something besides Virtua Fighter," Kataoka says recently in an interview with EGM. One of the most popular fighting game series of all time and yet refusing to join the online foray. Which seems like an odd choice with arcades being all but extinct in the world outside of Japan. Games like DOA4 are enjoying a whole new level of success never seen before by being online.

Games since the dawn of time have been about 'multiplayer'. Until videogames, most games were not single player games. Granted you will still be able to go to the arcade to play VF, however people outside of Jpn soon won't have that option. Maybe Sega just wants to focus on their Jpnese market only which would be an odd decision at how well VF4/Evo have sold in America.

Humans by nature are gregarious creatures - we seek one another out to have fun. Look at things like QuakeCon or Evo2k where thousands of people come together from all over the world. Some of these people bring huge equipment including monitors and joysticks. People want to get together and play games and when they can't their next option is to play online. Limiting that may very well limit the appeal that the game will have in the future, especially to those who have grown up with online games such as Halo.

Sega before has done other fighting games such as Fighting Vipers which wasn't met with that much success. However the gameplay wasn't as precise as VF and could very well be a good candidate for online play.

So how does everyone think - sega is playing it smart by staying offline or missing out on moving into the next realm of gaming by not bringing VF online?

The importance of first levels and the 80/20 rule

The very beginning of a videogame is arguably the most important part. People are willing to dismiss all the hard work that has been done immediately if the game doesn’t immediately grab them. I know I’ve done it and I’m sure everyone reading this has as well. The true beginning of a game for me starts with the front-end and if that sucks, I’m already not looking forward to the game. However the first ‘level’ is what we are going to concern ourselves with. Some games don’t have levels in the traditional sense but I think what I am going to talk about can still apply in the general sense.

Vilfredo Pareto was an economist who is credited with establishing what is now widely known as the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule. When he discovered the principle, it established that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. Later, he discovered that the pareto principle was valid in other parts of his life, such as gardening: 80% of his garden peas were produced by 20% of the peapods.

There are tons of examples of where this holds true if you want to know more. A simple search on google will yield more results then I’m willing to babble about.

For some reason I find this number fascinating and have tried to inject it into game design. I’m sure the number could easily be applied to what games sell – 20% of games amount for 80% of the revenue or whatever, with games like GTA, Madden, etc being part of that 20%. But to be honest that only interests me for about 10 minutes and then I get bored and think about something else.

After I got bored, I started thinking about flipping it around and saying that 80% is necessary and 20% is not. Talking at random with Eric Williams, one of the other combat designers for God of War we both agreed this number has some merit. A rule of thumb that we came up with on God of War for the combat was, “Anything a pro can do a button masher can do but only 80% as well.”

Thinking more about this number and how it could be applied to game design – I noticed something about first levels of games, a good first level involves 80% of what the game is about. By this I mean that in the first level you are going to do 80% of all the things you will be doing in the rest of the game. There are many great examples of first levels that do this but I’m going to talk about 2, mostly because I know these levels inside and out. One from playing so much as a kid and the other from playing so much while working on it.

Super Mario Bros world 1-1
One of the greatest games of all time also happens to have one of the greatest first levels. There are a lot of things that go into making a first level great – artwork, sound, ‘fun’ things to do and being accessible. For the time when this game was released, this level had it all. Play the first few notes to this level and everyone can finish the rest.

I’m sure we all recognize this screenshot as the very beginning of the game. This beginning tells us much of what the game is about: Jump on creatures to kill them and jump and bump your head into blocks. The ones with question marks give out goodies – such as coins and mushrooms which make you grow bigger. The ones without questions marks can be interacted within the game world: small Mario can hit them and big Mario can destroy them. The fact that normal brick blocks can hide goodies is saved for later on in this level.

80% of what this game is about is done in this first level – from discovering how to attack creatures to destroying blocks to finding hidden section and hidden 1ups. The list goes on though: hopefully becoming fiery Mario, becoming invincible, tricky jumps to barely make to completing the level by landing on the flagpole to receive the bonus and maybe some fireworks if you are lucky.

This level does a good job of exposing the player to what the game is truly about while holding on to surprises such as swimming for later on.

God of War – Hydra Level
I was not involved at all with the level design of this game, let alone design for this level. Although I feel weird talking directly about a game I’ve worked on – I feel distant enough from this aspect to discuss it. Plus I played this level so much that I know it intimately enough to write something about it.

The game starts off with you fighting enemies with enough of an opening movie to pique your curiosity. This alone does a really good job of summing up what the game is about! From here you mash on R2 to open up a door teaching the player how to open up doors. Then a quick boss encounter happens where you are taught how to perform mini-game kills with the gigantic button prompts. From there you cross the chasms with balance beams. The player is then quickly introduced with a few more boss encounters, a simple puzzle (the box push puzzle), wall combat, gaining magic, and ending with a boss encounter that includes a puzzle as well. Eighty percent of what is done in God of War is done in this first level.

Conclusion
I’m sure there are plenty of ‘bad’ games where you do 80% of what the game is about in the first level. I think what games such as SMB1 and RE4 do so well during their first level is keep presenting you with new tasks to hold your interest. First levels are really hard to get right and there is no magical formula to making one.