I did blog about that before

I mentioned it in passing in my Notes on Zelda. So I repeat myself. So what? Jack Trout and Al Reis have made a career out of repeating themselves.

Psycho Mantis: WTF?

Jurie Horneman's blog reminded me of something.

I think the Psycho Mantis boss fight from Metal Gear Solid, where you have to use controller 2 to beat him, is the stupidest thing ever. Nor do I like it in MGS2, when you have nightmare sequences where alien voices tell you you're just a computer game. Nor did I like it in Max Payne, when you were on Valkyr and a sinister phone call told you you were just a computer game. Hell, I don't even like it when in-game characters tell you, "Use the Circle button to activate sniper mode!" or whatever.

Designers might say: "We're consciously breaking the fourth wall for ironic value or for deconstructive metafictional whatever. We're the Italo Calvino of computer games. We rock." To which I say: cut it out, you pretentious bastards.

Or maybe they would say: "It's just a computer game. Nobody really suspends their disbelief. They don't really feel like Spider-Man, or a skateboarder, or a criminal. The game's a metaphor, not a simulation. So we're just having a little laugh along with the player." And although hearing this depresses me, I can't really argue with it. Some people like games-as-games, they're all about overcoming challenges and solving puzzles and mastering strategies, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I like it too, but it's not my main thing. I see computer games as an opportunity to explore a new frontier - create new worlds - give people experiences that they can't have in real life. That's my main thing.

So I'll say this: when you break the fourth wall you fuck it up for me. Let me have my little fantasy that I really am Solid Snake, okay?

It's easy to not break the fourth wall. It takes almost no extra work. Here's all you have to do:

- resist the urge to tell "It's just a computer game" jokes. You get a laugh, sure, but at the expense of immersion.

- separate what the character knows from what the player knows. The character doesn't know about the user interface widgets, the controller, the pause menu, the targeting reticle. The character doesn't see those huge glowing cylinders that say to the player "Stand Here And Your Mission Is Complete". Characters in the game should not talk about those things. On the other hand, you *can* have text on-screen or a disembodied tutorial voice that tells you what buttons to hit and what things do. An ideal solution: when the voice of command HQ comes over your headset, instead of telling you, "Press the B button to activate sniper mode", it should say, "You're going to have to use your sniper rifle here," and on-screen text can flash, "Press B button to activate sniper mode."

Deja vu...have I blogged about this before?

New episode of Manager In A Strange Land up

Joe Bob says check it out.
I've gotten some feedback on the column, which I may or may not incorporate into future issues.
On the topic of bug tracking, Andrew Bennett, an Oddworld Inhabitant, passed this on:
"I've found that the curve goes up and up when you first enter test, then eventually peaks and starts down, and hence gives you false hope, but when you get play-thru the graph turns upwards again for a short time, which is always enough to scare you senseless if you're not expecting it!"
I've only seen the double peak once, and that was on Spider-Man, and it did indeed scare me senseless. (We didn't actually graph our bugs for Die By The Sword or Draconus, so there may or may not have been double peaks there.) There were no double peaks on the Tony Hawks I ported, so it may be something limited to games with original content.
What's annoying is you don't know how you're doing until you start coming off that second peak. That's when you know if you're "coming in hot and steep" or not, to quote Mike McShaffry.
And Mark Brockington of Bioware said this: "FYI, Neverwinter Nights was only about 180 man years (I asked Trent). Trent likes to claim it was five years ... there were only two people on it for the first 18 months (the art director and Trent!)."

Notes On Ghosts 'n' Goblins And Prince Of Persia

Ok, so I dusted off MAME and gave Ghosts 'n' Goblins a shot. I don't see what's so great about it. I know people read this blog who think it's the BEST GAME EVAR so let the comments fly.

Now, this may because I wasn't there when it first came out, so I don't know what kind of ground it broke or why it's important.

On the other hand, I pulled out the original Prince Of Persia again and remembered just how delicious an experience it was when it first came out: the game elements are introduced slowly, one-by-one. You can't advance until you figure out the new element. The fencing was one of the first games I can think of where you don't have a tortoiseshell defense: you have to watch the attacker, wait for the tell, and then parry when he attacks. Then riposte quickly. And repeat. Once you're good, it really looks like movie fencing. A skeleton you pass in the halls seems like it's just cosmetic decoration; when you return, it comes to life. It's unkillable - it teaches you the art of forcing an enemy backwards, off a ledge. Secrets off the top or bottom of the screen that you can find by testing for loose panels or letting yourself down into chasms.

And then there's the stupid design decision of the year award: one hour to complete the whole game, or start over from the beginning.

Playing old games makes you realize that game designers for the most part don't know what the hell they're doing. They're trying stuff. Stuff that works makes it into future games. Stuff that doesn't you never see again.

Another Addendum

When I think profitable, I forget to include part of the cost of making a game - the publisher overhead. And I don't mean marketing, I mean administrative - I mean producers and CEO's salaries. And testing. Lately I've heard that the cost breakdown for a game tends to be one-third development, one-third marketing, and one-third "administration" - that's publisher overhead, and includes testing. Given this new knowledge, maybe shitcanning Die By The Sword was in fact the way to go.

Addendum

Rich reminded me today that they're coming out with Ultima X Online. So even Ultima isn't dead. Apparently this new one is an MMO. Sounds like a bad idea, to me: they're just going to pull customers away from UO. I think what the world needs is an Ultima game that brings back the feeling of Ultima IV - VII: single-player (or maybe Diablo / Bioware style multiplayer); multi-party; seamless living world; moral choices; top-down perspective. Ultima freakin' invented that. The ad copy could read: "Ultima: We Freakin' Invented That." (Nobody need know that none of the original creators are involved.)

A Videogame Franchise Is Forever

Word on the street is that Homeworld 2 is performing quite well, thank you. This surprised me because I didn't buy it. I played halfway through Homeworld, got bored, and quit. I had no interest in playing anymore. But hey, I'm not into RTS. I'm not their market. People who want RTS in 3d space - Homeworld is the place they come to. Sequels frequently perform better than their originals. You get the people who loved the original and all their friends who never actually got around to playing the original. So I shouldn't have been surprised.

How many videogames can you think of that were good enough to make sequels of, but not good enough to make three of? How many videogame brands have fizzled, supposedly never to return?

Impossible Mission. Ultima. (Unless you count the fact that Ultima Online is still going.) My own Magic Candle. Aliens Vs. Predator. (But there are rumors of a movie in the works...and then we'll see another installment of the game, I'm sure.) Wizardry is supposedly done, I hear. That's all I can think of, even after a little research. It looks bad for Might and Magic - haven't seen anything in over a year, but 3dO sold it off to somebody... I wish they would stop making Army Men but they probably will keep right on going. (Good thing nobody's holding a gun to my head and making me play them.) Good news for Eidos - a license that was once strong can survive a horrible title and keep going. (Castlevania.) So expect more Tomb Raider. Who knows, maybe one day somebody will make another good one.

Noah Falstein points out the Godfather Paradox: unlike the movies, not only is it possible to have a sequel game that's better, it can sell better. With a movie, your sequel is almost guaranteed to pull in fewer viewers than the original - they haven't seen the original, so why should they see the sequel? And with each iteration, you'll scrape off another layer of viewers. It doesn't happen with videogames. When Max Payne 2 comes out, do people say, "Eh, I never even played Max Payne. How will I be able to follow the plot?" No, they hear it's even better than Max Payne and snap it right up. I know people for whom The Wind Waker was their first Zelda. (And Link to the Past was my first. I've never played the original.) People don't care about continuous narrative in videogames.

So what does that mean to us? One thing it means is, don't freak out and dump your ATVI stock because Tony Hawk 4 dramatically underperformed - it is not necessarily a trend. Rich Bisso points out one possible reason it wasn't as huge a success as its predecessors: the packaging looked nearly identical, meaning a well-nigh-invisible retail presence. (I'd link to Rich's blog entry about this, but I can't find it. Rich, what'd you call your blog again?) Other possible reasons are: the standard slump for a title partway into console lifecycles; because it came out just a year after the previous one, which didn't give us much time to whet our appetite for a new one; and because of the Such-and-such's Pro Whatever branding we tried to do, which may have stolen sales from the core brand. We're fixing most of these problems: it has cool stand-out packaging, a different name, and we've done away with all the Such-and-such's Pro Whatever. But we just can't pass on the opportunity to have a Tony Hawk out for Christmas, can we?

Another thing it means is: if you've got an idea for a new title, you are not launching a single videogame. You are launching a brand. If it succeeds, you are creating a revenue stream for your company that could last a decade or two. Or three. Who knows how far it could go? The value of new IP could be immense. You could own a new category, or you could be Pepsi to someone else's Coke. Don't limp in. Don't freak out at the last minute, say, "people aren't going to buy this," and slash the marketing budget. (If you're good, people will buy what you tell them to buy.) Either win big or leave a smoking crater.

Also, even if that first game in the new brand didn't go AAA, but was still profitable, consider holding onto it: it could be a Homeworld.

Now we get to the "bitter much, Jamie?" part of the lecture: I think Interplay played Die By The Sword wrong. We had a whole new category of game there: sword fighting where you actually feel like you're swinging the sword. And we had limb severing. And we had a good name that tells you right out what the game is. (As Rich puts it, when I told him that Draconus was like Die By The Sword without the manual sword control and without the decapitation: "Dude, you cut off the left nut and the right nut of your game, there.") I can't prove it but I think Interplay spent much less on marketing than development. When a publisher panics, the way they cut their losses on a game is often to see it through to production but not spend any money on marketing--there were some print ads for our game, but when we missed our marketing window the print ads dried up. The next move a publisher does is to keep the team alive with an expansion pack contract while they "enter negotiations" for a sequel and check out how the game sells. Even though Die By The Sword was profitable, it was not a hit, and rather than continue building the brand they dumped it.

Interplay could have owned a whole category of game. We could have taken it to consoles and sold much more. When similar titles like Blades of Darkness came out, people would have called them me-too titles (whether it was justified or not) and no matter how good the games were people would have stayed loyal to the original. And eventually the new generation of controllers that are actually suited to controlling a guy with one stick while controlling the sword with the other stick would come out, and we'd be laughing. Don't get me wrong, it was a small pie to own - 9 out of 10 gamers surveyed prefer guns to swords for patients who kill people. But that 1 out of 10 would have been ours, while a host of other games split the 90% between them. Hey, Kill Bill isn't doing bad, right?

Okay, rant over.

Notes on Maximo

Combat has been done to death. Most videogames are either focused on combat, or combat is one of the predominant elements of the game. It's almost impossible to avoid. Unfortunately, one publisher pretty much owns the category: Capcom. From Final Fight to Viewtiful Joe they've maintained leadership.

I recently asked myself: Capcom's best fighting games have a fixed camera. How do they fare in the nightmare world of the from-behind-free-moving camera - the world I've lived in ever since I worked on Die By The Sword?

The answer is Maximo.

And yes, it's inferior to their fixed-cam and side-scrolling titles, such as Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe. (Don't take my word for it. Check gamerankings.) The from-behind camera brings with it two problems, right off the bat: sometimes you can't see the opponent that's right in front of you, and it's hard to gauge distances, either for attacking or for platform-jumping.

(Side note: Maximo has platform-jumping. Does that make it a platformer? There's this continuum between full beat-em-up (Final Fight) and platformer (Mario) ... if they're nonlinear (which Maximo is) we call them action adventure...but there's no hard line between these genres.)

Still, Maximo may be the leading beat-em-up with a free camera.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: why are Capcom games so freakin' hard? I borrowed the game from the library at work, and returned it after being restarted at the beginning after eight lives. A shelf level event. It's only because I've been studying beat-em-ups that I pulled it out again, to discover that if I'd gone just a little farther I would have found a save point. Even still, I only played six levels before shelving it again. Now, VJ and DMC were this difficult too, but I kept at them. Why did I put down Maximo? I think because if you break Maximo down into its component atoms--the basic interactions between you and the beasties--what you get is not that satisfying. Contrast with Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, and Halo, where the very act of firing a gun, swinging a sword, or dodging a bullet is a delicious polished moment.

Maximo may be counting on its Ghosts & Goblins heritage to save it. After all, killing a single monster wasn't terribly satisfying in G&G either - it's the game taken as a whole that makes it cool. (This is just an assumption. Have to admit I haven't actually played G&G much. I'll have to break out the MAME in a bit and give it another go.) Holistically, Maximo is clever: there's a short, easy introductory level that takes you to a hub, where you can choose. Parallel challenges with mutual assistance: you earn coins as you play which you can spend on game saves, potions, armor, and more. Beat the boss and another short, easy level takes you to another hub. (This is where I quit playing.)

Something I personally really appreciate about Maximo is this: Every move has its use. We're all familiar with games--such as Devil May Cry or Tony Hawk or Spider-Man--where they (or we, if it's Spider-Man...) give you a bunch of different combat moves because they look cool, when really the game relies on a small base set of vanilla moves and that's all you need. If you're just looking at the game-game-type-game, these other moves might as well not exist. You find the dominant tactic and use that and the others fall away. With Maximo - in my opinion - less is more: the slash does less damage but effects a wider arc, and the overhand swing does more damage in a very narrow arc, and there's a double-jump attack which is the only way to hit prone enemies. There are two missile attacks, but one wears out your shield and the other burns up any enchantment you have on your sword. And that was all I discovered, but I did only make it 25% of the way into the game. I appreciate this. But do the masses? There must be a reason these other move-heavy games are successful.

Another thrilling episode of Manager In A Strange Land went live.

Aw, crap

I wrote a lot more about Viewtiful Joe and how Bullet Time is to slow-motion gameplay as Kleenex is to tissue, but somehow screwed it up and lost it. Incorrect use of the 'draft' button. To sum up: it has a simple dominant strategy, which is a shame, but it takes a while to find, which is maybe all you can ask of a game that's only intended to give you a dozen hours of gameplay? And even though it attempts to holistically balance the game by giving you more power-ups the longer you play, it's still freaking hard. Oh, but I have a point to make:

Focus

Richard Rouse III talks about how important focus is in his game design book. I actually think he may be underestimating.

In one of these Trout / Reis books I've been reading -- I forget which one -- they pointed out that Volvo used to get mediocre marks across the board before they started marketing themselves as the 'safe' car. When they marketed themselves as the 'safe' car, their ranking for safety skyrocketed, but it pulled up most of their other scores (reliability, etcetera) as well. (I may be mixing up details here. They may have been talking about some other car and attribute entirely. Still, my point remains.)

I think we see this same kind of halo effect in videogames. When a videogame does one thing very well, you either ignore its problems or say to yourself, "The designer must have meant to do that." The first Max Payne: the bullet-time combat is so good that we ignore the fact that the game is too easy, that the bosses are undifferentiated, that the plot is tough to follow. Halo: the controls are so tasty that we blot out our memory of slogging through the flood. GTA3: the crime experience is so visceral that we ignore the blocky hands of the characters, the avatar's ridiculous jump animation, the low detail of the building textures. Tony Hawk: the hyperbolic skateboarding and compelling trick system are so good, we assume that the dinginess of the art direction is part of the intended package. (Which it is. We wanted to punch up the colors some for our ports but we were denied. Keep it gritty, we were told.)

And focus isn't just for game design. It's also for marketing. Your focus should be what differentiates you from your competitors. It's the USP that your marketing team should be driving into the heads of your marks. I mean customers.

Which brings me to a quandry. When working on a game, I like to feel like it isn't the vision of just one person. Everybody on the team contributes. And yet if one person is setting a focus, and all the cool ideas extraneous to that focus are shut down...then it's not everybody's game anymore.

By the way, a focus isn't strictly, absolutely necessary. Does Zelda have a focus? Sometimes a game does a lot, and does it all awesome.

Cool thing

I sent a wanky e-mail about how I was having trouble upgrading to BlogSpot Plus and they set me up free. No more ad banner. And I can look at statistics about who's accessing the blog. Fun fact: twice today, people were referred because they were doing google searches for videogame downloads.

What did I do to deserve this, other than whine? I'm wondering if there's some way they can make money off of keeping me happy but don't see how.

Notes on Viewtiful Joe

or

Why I love "bullet time", no matter what you call it

Viewtiful Joe is to beat-em-ups as Halo is to console first-person-shooters. The controls of Halo are delicious; at the game's atomic level, the very act of aiming and firing a weapon has been given meticulous attention. The same goes for VJ, but now the focus is hand-to-hand beating.

I'm not much of a beat-em-up player: in the long history of games that were more or less linear romps with endless streams of badguys that you pummel and kick into submission, originating with Double Dragon and Final Fight, I never really got into it. This may be because Double Dragon, released in 1988, came out when I was in college, and my childhood twitch reflexes were already starting to decay. A lot of what you do, I'm told, is watch the badguys - wait for the 'tell' that lets you know an attack is coming - and then make the appropriate counter.

I suck at that.

Actually, to tell the truth, I'm not much good at first person shooters either.

Enter Bullet Time, courtesy of 3dRealms & Remedy. Bullet Time is what it feels like to have those teenage reflexes again.

Triple Post Day!

That can happen when you work on the weekend.
All I want to say is - I would so upgrade to BlogSpotPlus and get rid of that damn ad at the top of the screen if only their order server worked.

Sometimes it's fun to just read the Perforce changelist and see what amusing titles people come up with for their changes.
Changes like "Made combos madly funner" and "Sound check-in of DOOOOOOOM!" and "Whee" and "La, la, la, la, la, la - via allegre I mean, VOICE OVER!" (I admit it, the last one's mine.)
Got lost on the Double Fine web-page today. Doing research. For the column.
Why wait for Psychonauts when you can get the essence of Tim Schafer right there at http://www.doublefine.com/news.htm?

It's my turn to make fun of the N-Gage

You can't point to a single thing about the N-Gage and say, "This is why it failed." There are so many things wrong with it fixing just one of them won't help. For example, this Halloween discount promotion is not going to sell very many more N-Gage's: although it almost fixes the price problem, there are too many other problems to count.
Discounting is a loser move. It will sell a few more units in the short term, but if they return to their original price they won't sell any. Everybody will wait for it to go on sale again.
And it doesn't fix the price problem: one of Jack Trout's rules of pricing - it has to be in the same ballpark. $200 for an N-Gage when you can spend $75 on a GBA is still not in the ballpark.
But even if they sold the N-Gage for $100 they'd still be fucked by these two things:
1) It does not have a killer app. As you can see, there is only one game for the N-Gage that's even slightly above average. (70 approximately is the mean on Gamerankings.)
2) It's a swiss army knife. People do not want swiss army knives. They want specialty products. They want a game company to make their game machine. They want a cell phone company to make their cell phone. Convergence is a myth. It didn't happen with stereos and it won't happen with PDAs. (Note: right now, you're probably thinking "But I do want a toaster in my car. That would be very convenient." You say that, but you don't want a crappy toaster in a crappy car, and when the toaster car comes out, no matter how good its toaster and how good its engine you're still going to think that it's either a crappy toaster or a crappy car because how good could a toaster made by a car company or a car made by a toaster company possibly be?) Now, if you built a GBA into your phone...then maybe I'd buy it.

Videogame Production Newsgroup

This started over on Yahoo groups: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VideogameProduction/. There were about a dozen messages in one day and then crickets. Here's your chance to participate and make it something other than stillborn.

Xbox and .NET are complementary goods

Now you know why Microsoft introduced Xbox: so they could require developers to update .NET. 6000 game developers * $1000 = six million dollars! 94 million and they've recouped their costs. BTW, I pulled these figures out my ass.

Ahh, Eudora

Going back to Eudora after suffering under Outlook for a while is like going back to my old broken-in Doc Martens after trying Kenneth Cole.

Jesus

The number of hits to this site went up 10x after the Gama article went up...I guess because I had Alex Dunne put the link in my bio on Gama.

Better To Be Ridiculed Than Ignored

The first article in my column on managing game development went up today. Martin Donlon came up wtih the title: Manager In A Strange Land. (By the way, there should be a name for blogs that have like, two-three entries in them that haven't been updated in months.) I'm nervous. When you put yourself Out There, some percentage of people are going to think you're an idiot. But such is life.

More Armchair CEO Goodness

I'm about to take potshots at my own company here, so I should emphasize: the comments and opinions on this website do not reflect the opinions of Treyarch or Activision. I'm a guy in the trenches; I don't get to see the P & L's; I basically don't know jack about the decisions made behind closed doors in Washington.

Anyway, pretty soon Activision is coming out with True Crime: Streets of LA, our attempt at a GTA killer, which will put us in the me-too ranks with other titles like The Getaway, Simpsons: Hit & Run, and Roadkill. Each of these products tries to differentiate itself from GTA a different way, be it "The Simpsons", or "A Post Apocalyptic Future", or "You're In A Movie" or whatever. How is True Crime differentiating? With one simple word: "truth." True Crime is going to be more True, that is, more Real than GTA. The driving, fighting, and shooting are going to be next level immersive stuff.

Sounds decent. GTA but better. I might buy that. I'll give this marketing effort a B.

But still, imagine Joe Sixpack Xbox owner walking into EB and saying, "I heard Grand Theft Auto comes out for the Xbox today." He'll see not only Grand Theft Auto, but also this True Crime game. "True Crime?" he'll say. "Supposedly like GTA but better? Well, how come I never heard of it?" And he buys GTA.

In Differentiate or Die, Jack Trout says if you're not the leading brand with the killer attribute - then you should go "opposite" the leading brand's killer attribute. Pepsi's answer to Coke being the original is "We're for the new generation." McDonalds owns "fast"? Fight back with "We take the time to do it better." (Or - McDonalds is for kids. Be for adults.) Avis's most succesful ad campaign was "We Try Harder"; when they gave that up, they started losing market share. When 3d Realms & Remedy looked at Tomb Raider and asked themselves, "How can we go opposite of this?" They came up with an ugly male cop game, where shooting was emphasized over climbing. They came up with Max Payne. Maybe not as succesful as Lara Croft, but still wildly succesful.

What attribute does GTA own? Crime. It is, hands-down, the leading crime game. How do you go opposite of crime? Law enforcement.

Activision, at some level, knows this. What is really hard to tell from the marketing for True Crime is that it's a law enforcement game! You play a cop who takes the law into his own hands. It really is the opposite of GTA, and it could own the word "Law" in the same way that GTA owns the word "Crime." When True Crime was greenlighted, Activision was taking a play from Trout's playbook. A genius play: imagine walking into EB, and seeing a poster that says, "Sick of being the bad guy?" And the game has some cool law enforcement name, like, Police Procedure or All-Points Bulletin. (Side note: the arcade game All-Points Bulletin, with its top-down mission based policeman-in-the-city gameplay, is the ancestor to GTA. Wouldn't it be fun to bring that title back, and have heritage on your side as well as your good-guy position? "Before there was Grand Theft Auto - there was All Points Bulletin.") And you can keep the "Streets of LA" subtitle, since it's evocative of The Streets of San Francisco. Now people walking into EB aren't making a choice between which is the better crime game. They're making a choice between "Do I want to be a bad-guy or a good-guy?"

I know what you're thinking: "People these days, they all want to be bad." I might be willing to accept that most people want to be bad. I want to be bad. I went the dark side of the force route in Knights of the Old Republic, for example. The thing is, as long as some significant percentage of people would rather be cops than robbers, that's sales for you, almost regardless of which is the "better" or most popular game. Not only that, but you pull in the people who refuse to play GTA because they don't like the moral connotations (I have friends like this. Really.) and you pull in the large segment of mothers who would rather have their kids grow up to be cops than criminals and you get the T-rating instead of the M so you're more likely to get on the shelves at Wal*Mart. Finally, I think a significant percentage do root for the good guy. Consider Bad Boys 2 - by all accounts an atrocious movie, still a box office smash.

Believe me, at it's core, at it's inception, the theme of True Crime - you're a cop who takes law into his own hands - is genius.

But then Activision went and called it True Crime! And buried the law enforcement angle so deep I can barely even tell from the ad copy that's what it's about. All those people who want to play cops, and their mothers, are going to go into EB and they're going to think it's just another GTA. What the hell happened? I'm reminded of the scene in Dr. Strangelove: "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!"

Here's where I pull theories out of my ass. Theory 1: nobody told the advertising/PR department what the plan was. Although a shrewd marketer came up with the idea for a GTA-like game about law enforcement, he may have been part of development, or an executive, and therefore not actually, technically, part of the department that does our advertising and PR, which we call marketing, although that is somewhat of a euphemism, as they don't actually get to pick what products are greenlighted. So when they got their hands on it, they wrote down a list of its features, ran it by a focus group, which probably told them that crime was cooler than law, but realism sounded good, and there you have it. True Crime.

Theory 2: we lost our nerve. It sure looks like crime pays, doesn't it? Hard to argue with those numbers. Are you sure you want to make a cop game in this climate? It sounds risky. If I push for a cop game, and it doesn't sell well, I might lose my job. But if I go with the flow, hey. At least when the game doesn't sell it won't be my fault. I was just going with the numbers.

I wish there was some way to prove that I'm right, and Activision marketing should have pushed the law enforcement thing. No matter how well True Crime does, I'm going to believe it could have done better if we'd pushed the law enforcement thing.

The only way to prove me right will be if somebody makes a law-enforcement game where the marketing rides that angle, and spends a similar amount on marketing it. If it does better than True Crime, then I win, and I should switch careers from programming to marketing. If it does worse, than I should stay in the trenches and keep my mouth shut.

Notes on System Shock 2

"Your weapons fail. Your ammunition runs low."

This is the voice of the Many as you crawl inside them, and it could well be the motto of System Shock 2: unlike Halo and Doom, this is very much an FPS about conserving resources. You start with nothing, and will probably find yourself using melee weapons to conserve your precious ammo. And you save-crawl, doing segments over and over until you get them perfect, because that ammo and health is too valuable to squander. The result is a game that encourages mastery, but I'm guessing it's not for everyone. In fact, the first time I tried to play it, I wasted my resources two hours in, and gave up. This is what Rob Fermier, one of the developers, calls a "Shelf Level Event": it goes back on the shelf, never to be played again.

But one day I ran out of games and did play it again.

In the family tree of video games, System Shock 2 is the mutant love-child of Quake and System Shock. System Shock, in turn, is a descendent of Ultima Underworld. Ultima Underworld sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus. No it didn't. UW is, I believe, the first first-person realtime RPG, and therefore a child of the Ultimas and...I don't know...Wolfenstein 3d?

Excuse me if I ramble. Too much coffee tonight.

Computer role-playing games bring with them, almost by definition, some fundamentally sound game design principles. I mentioned some of them in my Notes on Zelda. These include:

Continous, expanding world: System Shock 2 all takes place on the connected bulkheads of the starship Von Braun and the connected sister ship, The Rickenbacker. Up until the final two levels of the game, you can always backtrack.

"Parallel challenges with mutual assistance": (thank you Noah Falstein) almost all RPGs have side gameplay that allow you to develop your character so that the mainline challenges become easier. System Shock 2 has an exploration element like this: you don't have to thoroughly search the Von Braun, but if you do, you'll be rewarded with powerups that you can use to improve your character. Another side quest is "research": you find certain items that you can bring to chemical storerooms and study. Studying them gives you various advantages.

Token Based Economy: Although you're alone on an effectively deserted space ship, there are vending machines that take the currency of System Shock 2: the nanite. This currency can be used to buy goodies, hack computers, and repair or improve your weapons, and is used by the developers as a small reward. System Shock 2 actually has two economies: the open-ended and ever inflating nanite currency, and the zero-sum (am I using that term right?) Cyber Modules currency, which allow you to improve your character. You can only improve your character so much in System Shock 2, because there's only so many Cyber Modules available. Which leads to:

Meaningful choices with perceivable consequences: there are many axes on which you can improve your character, but once you've chosen which axes to improve on, you're stuck. Also, a very interesting element in System Shock 2 which I don't think I've seen anywhere else is the Surgical Key. Throughout the world there are incomplete surgical beds. You can attach a surgical key to these to become active, at which point they give you close to free healing for the rest of the game. The surgical keys are very rare. I used one on an out-of-the-way surgical bed and regretted it for the rest of the game. The next surgical key I got, I was very careful about where I finally placed it: I made sure to put it near an elevator, so I'd always be able to get to it quickly from wherever I was.

One thing that isn't necessarily an RPG staple, but that System Shock 2 benefits from, is systemic design. They mention this in their post-mortem. ("Use of simple, reusable game-play elements.") The elements include gun turrets, videocameras, a handful of different kinds of enemies, security computers, hackable crates, e-mail logs, ghosts, and not a whole lot more. They are able to get a surprising amount of gameplay and story out of these few elements. System Shock indeed.

I mentioned that I was playing System Shock 2 to a friend at work and he said he thought there weren't enough open spaces in the levels. I think this was by design: the narrow corridors of the Von Braun are purposely claustrophobic, which sets it apart from the wide corridors and spaces of Quake and Halo.

System Shock and Myst pioneered, at roughly the same time, a new kind of interactive storytelling: the kind where you're dropped in a world and you have to piece together the backstory from information in the environment. The reason for doing it this way in System Shock was simple: they were so unhappy with the state of NPC interaction in videogames that they decided to not have any living ones. (http://www.gameslice.com/features/spector/index4.shtml) But it creates an interesting side-game; you're exploring a story. You're piecing together a mystery. In essence, with System Shock 2, there are two stories: the backstory of how things got the way they are, and the current story of trying to cope. This technique was later borrowed for Metroid Prime.

System Shock 2 is well balanced. You're struggling for resources in the beginning, you get to cut loose in the middle, and you struggle again at the end. This is partly due to the tireless efforts of Dorian Hart, but they also have some techniques that make the game self-balance to an extent: during the middle game you discover both healing stations and energy recharging stations. Returning to these stations allow you to fill up your ammo and health. In the second-to-last level, there is no healing and recharging, and you feel it. Another technique is when looting the bodies of dead monsters, they are more likely to have good stuff if you are low on ammo and health. Clever, eh? Finally, parallel challenges with mutual assistance smooths out rough areas: if you're not good enough to take on a challenge, you can research / explore in other directions until you're powerful enough.

Should I dis on the game at all? I can't help it: for me, the game was just too damn long. My save game alone recorded 16 hours of gameplay; that probably represents around 30 hours of actual play. You can play different types of character, so in theory I could go back and try one with Psi powers, something I wanted to do after ten hours of play but couldn't possibly take after twenty.

Also, System Shock 2 feels like a game without a focus. Like Deus Ex, they empower you to play the game the way you want to play, but that was the focus of Deus Ex, and with System Shock 2 it seems like yet another of the many features the game provides. (System Shock 2 even has mini-games: you can find a PDA that plays games like Minesweeper and simple RPG's.) So System Shock 2 is a jack of all trades and master of none. There's better shooting in Quake. Better AI in Half-Life. Better player empowerment in Deus Ex. Better character development in most RPG's. Better hacking in Uplink.

Lately I've come to realize that lacking focus isn't just dangerous from a design perspective; it's also bad marketing. When people ask me, "What's System Shock 2?" I don't know what to tell them. You should be able to say what's special about a game in a short, sticky sentence. "It's *The Sims* for children." "It's John Woo style gunplay." "It's gravity-defying snowboarding." "It's being Spider-Man."

I dunno. Maybe it's this:

"Your weapons fail. Your ammunition runs low."