Is UFC 2009 Undisputed too complicated for anyone else?0
Matt posted in Games on June 27th, 2009

I like UFC, and I enjoyed the Dreamcast game, so I decided to check out the latest game. It got positive reviews and has been selling well apparently. I spent like half an hour completing the tutorial which outlines a crap ton of moves. By the time I went to fight, I couldn’t remember half of what I was the tutorial covered. It uses both analog sticks, the 4 face buttons, all 4 shoulder buttons, the analog stick clicking, half rolls on the right stick, 3/8th rolls on the right stick, full circle rolls on the right stick and flicking the left stick (which is extremely difficult for me to do). I know I suck at games, but does this strike anyone else as too complicated? It’s very true to MMA, but I feel like only huge MMA enthusiasts will really enjoy the game… Maybe there are more out there than I would have guessed, but I don’t see myself wanting to play this game again…

Why the Current State of the Wii is Depressing0
Matt posted in Games, The Industry, Wii on May 21st, 2009

I have trouble finding games I want to buy on the Wii. I want to like the Wii, but there are just no games besides Super Mario Galaxy that I really feel are worth playing in the entire library of software. I quit Zelda after an hour or two because I got sick of hearding goats and cats. I’m sure the game gets better, but I just couldn’t force myself to go through the boring start. I wrote a small novel on my thoughts on Super Mario Galaxy on my blog, but the short answer is that I thought it was good and not great. It could have been great had I had a second analog stick and no motion controls. If you are curious as why I felt that way, get a big cup of coffee and start reading here and here. Wii Sports got dull for me pretty quickly, and I don’t much care for WarioWare. Sega let me down with Nights and Samba de Amigo. To be fair to the developer, Samba de Amigo couldn’t be done well on the Wii due to the fact that the Wii-mote can’t sense height, but perhaps the developers didn’t realize that was the case until after the signed the contract. This year, I’ll probably pick up Klonoa once it price drops despite that I already have the PS1 game, and House of the Dead: Overkill once it gets cheap despite that I hate the Wiimote as a light gun (because it isn’t). I’m a huge House of the Dead fan, so just like I picked up Nights and Samba de Amigo despite their abysmal reviews (although I got them pretty cheap), I can’t NOT buy a House of the Dead game. (I didn’t buy House of the Dead 2 and 3 for Wii though because I already have both games.) Two games (neither at full price) is a really really WEAK year. In fact, I think I bought Nights and Samba de Amigo this year, so if that’s the case, I bought NOTHING for Wii last year, which is probably the first time in my life I didn’t buy a game for a current gen console for an entire year. I even bought an SNES game last year, so it’s really strange that there was nothing on the Wii that I wanted. Maybe they’ll be some surprises for this year at E3, but after Nintendo’s snorefest last year, I doubt it’ll be anything I care about.

Anyway, I was complaining about the Wii being a huge disappointment to a friend, and he mentioned that the only game he felt that used the Wii well was Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. I’m not really a Metroid fan, and I don’t play FPSes without a keyboard and a mouse if I can help it, so I’m not really interested in that game. I told him that the real problem is that the general Wii market doesn’t want games like that or games that I personally would enjoy for that matter. I thought of a clever way to illustrate it that seems worth sharing with my blog reader. (Hi dad!) Compare the following:

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Release date (US): 8/27/07
Release date (EU): 10/26/07
Release date (JN): 03/06/08
Budget (estimated): $5,000,000 [This is an estimation by me with very little information to go on, so I make no promises to the accuracy]
Sales (estimated): 1.53 million (source: vgchartz.com)
Review Average: 89.64% (source: gamerankings.com)

Carnival Games
Release date (US): 8/28/07
Release date (EU): 10/26/07
Release date (JN): ?? (it sold a negligible amount in Japan, so it doesn’t really matter)
Budget (estimated): $500,000 [This is an estimation by me with very little information to go on, so I make no promises to the accuracy]
Sales (estimated): 3.29 million (source: vgchartz.com)
Review average: 59.21% (source: gamerankings.com) 

Metroid Prime cost 10 times as much in my estimation (actually, it’s probably more, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt). There is only one day difference in the release dates as well, so both were selling under the exact same market conditions.  I think it’s impossible to find titles with such similar release dates internationally (only one day difference in the US and the same in Europe. Both titles didn’t break 100k in Japan, so it’s moot). Metroid was a great game according to critics and Carnival Games was a stinker. Now as a gamer, you’d probably want to see more games like Metroid Prime 3. But if you worked at a publisher, which project would you greenlight? Metroid Prime 4 or Carnival Games 2? If you chose Metroid Prime 4, you probably wouldn’t keep your job for long since publishers are in the business of making money - not doing favors to gamers.

In the end, I think Nintendo’s blue ocean strategy of making a casual console worked too well. The loyal Nintendo fan base are the real victim’s of Nintendo’s newfound success. Luckily, there are enough titles that I want to play on other consoles (PS3/360 and pretty much every other older console), that I’ll cope. However, I feel rather sorry for a gamer that chose the Wii over a 360 that isn’t really interested in the casual titles.

PS: No I haven’t played World of Goo. I want to, but I’m going to play it on PC because I think the mouse makes a better mouse than the Wii-mote. I bought Strongbad and Sam & Max for PC as well.

The Fiscal State of Indie Downloadable Games7
Matt posted in Games, The Industry, My Work on February 17th, 2009

There are no official numbers for any digital distribution channels, but in looking at the only estimates I can find, on vgchartz.com, the sales outcome for most downloadable titles is pretty bleak. This goes against my philosophical stance of trusting a website that substitutes a z for an s, but they seem to be the only data that is readily available. So, here’s a link to the most up to date sales data through 2/13/09. Sorting that data by cumulative revenue, the top 10 is as follows: Texas Hold’em, Castle Crashers, Bankshot Billiards 2, Uno, Worms HD, Street Fighter 2 HF, Bomberman Live, Boom Boom Rocket, Castlevainia: SOTN, and PacMan CE. Four of those titles have been included in some sort of bundle, either with an Xbox console or the Xbox Live Unplugged bundle DVD game. Out of the 6 remaining, there’s only one original IP, Castle Crashers, which is doing amazingly well.  I have to congratulate the Behemoth for not only putting together a kick ass game but for actually creating one that has really achieved the holy grail of indie game development by making a ton of money as well. Now comes the bad news.

If we look at all games that aren’t free, there are 184 titles. Just under half of them made less than $500,000. Now, half a million may seem like a large budget for an indie game, but you have to consider that Microsoft and/or a publisher is taking a cut. Assuming the split put forward here, and the developers are only taking 35% of that $500k, that’s $175k. Developing an Xbox Live title is most likely going to cost you more than $175k. It can vary widely, so I’m not going to speculate on the average cost, but I think it’s safe to say that well over half the titles on XBLA are not profitable.

But in looking at the upper end, Castle Crashers has over half a million units if vgchartz stats are accurate. It’s still fairly early in the lifecycle of the product, and it’s selling quite well currently, but I’d be surprised if they could break a million. The only titles that have so far are Uno and Aegis Wing. Aegis Wing is free, and Uno is a very popular card game and only costs $5 and is included in both the Xbox Live Arcade console and with the Xbox Vision Camera. 1 million in sales is nothing to scoff at, but it’s hardly the amazing cash out of some indie movie successes like the Blair Witch Project. (It cost $60,000 and grossed $140 million in the box office)

 I think this is why publishers aren’t really all that keen about this space. Although there are movie companies like Lions Gate and Focus that focus on indie and smaller budget movies, the payoff for an indie film can be huge – enough to amortize the loss of many unsuccessful indie films. Although some indie movies have limited appeal, I think many indie or inexpensive movies can have audience sizes that are in line with many blockbusters. I think plenty of games sell multiple millions (the real blockbuster games break 10 million), but multiple millions is unheard of in the XBLA space. Aegis Wing  is free and has only gotten 1.5 million downloads (according to vgchartz). That to me means that the average gamer isn’t really all that interested in smaller cheaper games, which is disappointing because that’s all indies can afford to make.

Another troubling fact is that if you look at the high sales games, most are remakes or rereleases. Ignoring the anomalous Castle Crashers and the various bundled games, Braid comes in as the first original game that’s not a remake or rerelease behind 6 other titles (and Castle Crashers and some bundled games of course). The trend continues in the top sellers. Two thirds of the top 30 games by revenue games are board/card/video game remakes or sequels to existing IPs. I imagine that sends the message to publishers that their best bet is to rerelease old stuff and not invest in new original products.

Anyway, I’m not trying to say that indie game development is doomed. Obviously if I thought that, I wouldn’t be trying my hand at it. But, I think it’s important to look at indie game for what it is. It’s a very fulfilling thing to work on, but a very difficult thing to make money from. Do I think Retro/Grade will be successful financially? Yes I do. If I didn’t, then I would make adjustments to make sure I thought that it would be. Am I the best judge of that? No, of course not. It’s my baby. Every parent thinks their baby is the cutest regardless of how hideous he/she is. Hahahahah Of course I think it’s fun and worth what we will charge for it. Will the general public? Only time will tell.

In the end though, everyone votes with their wallets, so if you want to continue to see lots of creative indie titles, be sure to keep buying them. That’s the only way to keep small developers doing creative and original games in business.

Why the Hollywood Studio Model Doesn’t Work for Games2
Matt posted in Games, The Industry, My Work on February 17th, 2009

Kotaku mentioned an article on Slate entitled What’s Killing the Video-Game Business? The author goes onto assert that more titles should be developed externally in order to save the publishers money and is surprised that is not what EA is doing. For those in the industry, this should seem ridiculous, but I wrote an explanation of why that doesn’t make sense for the Kotaku discussion that I figured I’d repeat here if anyone was interested. So here it is with a few slight additions:

The author really doesn’t understand how the video game industry works. Making video games is NOT the same as making movies! In film, there is a standard set of tools (cameras, actors, lights, etc), but that is far from the case in the game industry. Every game development company has their own proprietary tools, pipelines and technology. These vary greatly, so there’s no way that the game industry can switch to forming a company for just one game and disbanding at the end.

On the art side of things, all game shops pretty much use Maya (and to a lesser extent 3dsmax and XSI), but artists often use proprietary world building tools for placing assets, different tools for lighting, and the pipelines can vary a great deal. (The pipeline is how the art gets into the game) The actual job that designers do varies greatly from place to place. If they do their design purely on paper, then it’s quite easy to move them from project to project. Often designers have to use world building tools and/or scripting languages to set up the gameplay. This can have a steep learning curve, so it’s difficult to move them around.

For programmers, it’s the worst. When companies find a good programmer, they want to hold onto them for life because they are hard to find, and it is very difficult for people to debug code that was written by someone else. This is a fact of any software development and something that film completely doesn’t have to deal with. Technology stays around for years (and in some case over a decade), so you need someone to maintain and modify it that is familiar with it. Whenever a new programmer is hired, there is a steep learning curve until they can get up to full speed regardless of programmer talent. The best in the industry can get up to speed quicker, but no one can ever just pick up where someone else left off. Sometimes companies even want to hang onto bad programmers when they worked on an important facet of the technology and their code is a mystery to everyone else.

The only thing analogous to video game development in the film world is the development of CG movies. CG shops have many developers working on their internal tools and technology.  Dreamworks, Pixar, and Blue Sky don’t disband after every production because they have internal software and artists trained to use them. If it doesn’t make sense for them, it certainly doesn’t make sense for games where the net product is software and not a series of static images.

Bringing more titles in house to publishers makes sense from a business perspective. Although to my knowledge, no publisher has been particularly successful at this, having one shared set of tools, pipelines and technology that they use for most if not all of their titles would give the publisher more flexibility in moving people between projects, which is important from a manpower standpoint. As well, as the cost of each art asset rises as the amount of detail is increased, more publishers will probably maintain a library of game assets to share between their internal teams. Doing more work internally is a cost saving measure. Reversing that would be a nightmare. The only caveat is outsourcing for art and animation, cutscenes and other well defined tasks is definitely going to increase, but the actual production of the game (especially the programming) is going to stay in house.

As someone who just recently started a game company, I don’t want to see all the work stay with the publishers, but from their standpoint, it makes the most sense. If publishers go out of business, that’s not going to help us either, so what is best for them fiscally is best for the industry. I only hope I can get 24 Caret Games established before it’s too late because it’s only getting harder to start a new studio as time progresses. That was one of the reasons why I decided to start it now because it seemed like it was now or never. If 24 Caret Games fails, then I may have to abandon hope of working for myself…

[In response to commentors talking about unions in the game industry] Also, unions are never going to happen. They raise the cost of development. If one did happen, that would just drive more work overseas. There is no shortage of people willing to work crazy hours in any game discipline (especially testing), so unions will never get off the ground. The only time organized labor works is when you can’t find people willing to do the job or when an existing union controls the people who do it currently. I think unions in most fields in the United States have outlived their usefulness and are driving more jobs overseas.

Uwe Boll Film Festival Day 1 AKA My Personal Interview with Doctor Boll0
Matt posted in Games on December 18th, 2008

The inaugural day of the Uwe Boll film festival was today in Downtown LA, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.  Unfortunately, it started at 12pm on a Wednesday. I had already seen all of his video game adaptations, so I was just planning on attending the Q&A and world premiere of Far Cry. Someone informed me that the website was factually incorrect and that Far Cry was already out in Crytek and Boll’s native Germany, so I guess it’s only the US or North American premiere of the movie. Not quite as impressive anymore, is it?

LA traffic seemed bad, so I decided to leave early to make sure I could get a good spot in line for the Q&A. I’m used to the panels at Comic-Con where if you want to get a question in, you have to get in line before the actual panel starts, stand there the entire time, and they’ll still probably run out of time. My title is a bit of a spoiler though, so it didn’t quite play out as I had imagined. I showed up at about 8:15 pm. Seed is an hour and a half and was supposed to start at 7 pm, so I was pleased that I showed up in time for the Q&A. When we arrived, we were immediately disappointed to find out that Uwe was NOT actually in attendance… Either day! Yet another ruse to sucker more people into coming! Luckily, most people are smarter than I because when we asked how turnout was, the people running the show laughed and said there were a lot of invisible people in the audience. We bought a ticket for Far Cry, and they said we could go in and “enjoy” the tail end of Seed. When we went into the theater, there appeared to only be 5 other people there. We ended up watching most of Seed because they were running a bit late.

Now one might ask why I was there in the first place. I love bad movies – they crack me up. Imagining the people making them and why they made these silly choices always brings a smile to my face. Well, almost always. Sometimes movies are too bad to be funny like Gigli or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. However, Uwe’s films are usually the correct level of badness to be entertaining. Unfortunately, I have a very loud laugh that’s kind of hard to stifle. It’s gotten me into trouble at some other films I’ve seen in the theater like Catwoman. I wouldn’t stop laughing so the people in front of me gave me a dirty look and moved. I was really expecting to find a large audience of people who delight in the badness of Boll films, but instead I was greeted by an unknown audience of people. The people there were hard to read. Why were they sitting alone in the barren theater? What motivation did they have to be one of the few at the Uwe Boll Film Festival?

As a precaution, I was trying to not laugh too loudly to not ruin the other 5 people’s enjoyment of the film, but I unfortunately cracked up at several points. I say unfortunately because as it turned out, in the audience was Michael Paré and composer Jessica de Rooij. I talked to Jessica a bit later and she was an extremely nice young lady (and I tried to listen to the score for Far Cry, and I thought it was good), but I didn’t really talk to Michael Paré, but I’m sure he’s a nice guy and a talented actor. I just don’t think he had much to work with for the script with Seed. Hell, even Sir Ben Kingsley managed to look bad in a Boll film. So, I’d like to personally apologize (in writing) to both Michael Paré and Jessica de Rooij. I meant no disrespect. I just found Seed really funny…

Anyway, since Uwe was in Canada filming The Storm, the Q&A session was conducted via Skype and projected on the big screen. It initially started out with Michael and Jessica engaging in some small talk. I guess Uwe had an infant child because he was playing with him when the interview began. I wasn’t aware that he was married, but I guess there’s not a lot of info about his personal life out. Anyway, so he said the baby was the real Boll and was going to give the interview and joked around for a bit. Then he was talking about how cold it was in Canada. He took the camera outside to show the snow, and his dog almost ran out. He told his dog “nein”, when it tried to leave. I don’t know why, I just think it’s funny that he speaks to his dog in German. He continued to make small talk about his dog and how he spent one evening from 11:30 pm to 1:30 am looking for the dog, but it turned out he/she was just at the neighbors. I really wanted to ask Uwe some meaty questions, so I sort of interrupted to try and get some serious discussion of film in.

Uwe was happy to answer my questions and seemed like a friendly good natured guy. I don’t want to get into a boxing ring with him though. Although I thing Uwe’s movies are so bad they are funny, I didn’t want to ask anything really mean spirited because I don’t have anything against him, and he doesn’t seem to respond well to criticism. Who does though? I hope he keeps making movies, and I will keep seeing them, so I wish him the best of luck. The video game adaptations are my favorites especially after reading about some of the movies he has planned that aren’t based on games. Have you heard about Stoic? No, me neither until Jessica mentioned that she did the music for it. I looked it up on Wikipedia and here’s what it had to say:
“Stoic centers on the true event where three German inmates gambled on a poker game. The loser is forced to eat, regurgitate, and eat his own vomit. The tale escalates into much more when the inmates rape the man for 10 hours before forcing him to commit suicide”
Yeah, I like it better when he draws his inspiration from video games…

Anyway, so I had the mic and no one else seemed to want it, so I got to pick Uwe’s brain about whatever. So, to the best of my recollection here’s what happened. My first question was supposed to be: “One of the main differences between the theatrical cut and the director’s cut of Bloodrayne was scenes of seemingly random violence inserted near the end. Was this meant as a social commentary on man’s inhumanity to man?” Now, when I say seemingly random, I mean definitely random. It’s ridiculous! It seemed like he just had some extra special effects budget and put in a bunch of random gore that hit the cutting room floor. However, I didn’t want to come out and say that it didn’t fit in the movie, so I wanted to come up with a description of a somewhat believable explanation of perhaps why it was in there, so he’d have an out if he didn’t want to come out and say it was just to add more gore. However, he didn’t hear me, so when I repeated the question, he picked up on it before I gave my half-assed explanation and set the record straight. It turns out that the director’s cut is the theatrical cut, and the DVD distributor just made him add in extra gore. That’s a much more sensible explanation than what I came up with. Although it may seem like a silly compromise to make, I imagine getting a better distribution deal for a low budget movie like that is important, so it may have made financial sense.

My second question was about the camera work in Seed. The camera was pretty shaky, so I asked if he was inspired by Lars von Trier who started the Dogme 95 movement that includes the tenant “The camera must be a hand-held camera. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; filming must take place where the action takes place.)” He picked up on the comparison to Dogme and mentioned that wasn’t really an influence. I couldn’t quite follow him during this explanation because Skype isn’t exactly the greatest connection in the world, and he does have a pretty thick German accent. I think he was saying that he was influenced by other things for Seed, and I think that he said he was more influenced by Dogme for another movie called Rampage. This movie isn’t on his imdb page, but I heard Jessica mention it later. Her friend said it was the name of a video game with giant monsters breaking buildings, but I didn’t get the impression that was what it was about (unfortunately). I was kind of (okay, definitely) eavesdropping at that point, so I don’t have the full scoop on Rampage.

My third question was about the camera work on Seed as well. During a torture scene in Seed, the camera does a quick zoom in and out when Seed hits some random lady. In my opinion, it looked pretty bad. I took a few film classes in college for fun and was under the impression that they didn’t really use the zoom lenses much on cameras for professional films. However, when they do, they can do some really cool stuff like an amazing scene in Goodfellas where the main characters remain in the same place on screen but the background moves. This was done by moving the camera away from the characters while zooming in on them. I don’t really care for camera shake in video games so maybe a rapid zoom in and out would look cool to others. He said he wasn’t and went on that a lot of the camera work was influenced by the way he shot the film. There wasn’t much of a script (according to him), and they changed a bunch of stuff in order to make it work. There was apparently also a scene of Seed doing aerobics and pushups or something for a while before attacking the poor woman. He said that was too absurd. I would have argued that Seed was able to walk around and kill people in broad daylight without anyone calling the cops was absurd, but what do I know.

Although Uwe may not be the world’s greatest director, he may be competent given a good script. However, I think the scripts for his movies are extremely weak, and that’s where he gets a bad rap. This is apparently why he wrote Postal because he felt like he was getting blamed for the story when he hadn’t written the scripts to any of his video game adaptations. My fourth question was how he finds writers for his video game adaptations when he doesn’t write them himself. He misheard me and instead talked about when he chooses to write the movies instead of hiring writers. He said he can’t write stuff really quickly and can’t really churn out 80-100 pages really quickly, so he only writes them when he’s hearts in the project. The video game adaptations are fun to make he said, but his heart is really in films like Postal, Seed and Tunnel Rats. I’ve heard in at least Tunnel Rats that most of the dialog is improvised, so I’m not sure if he had to churn out 100 pages for that. As well, he mentioned there wasn’t a real script for Seed either…

I followed with my original question. He mentioned that he gets treatments from different writers. He tried to get a more serious writer for Bloodrayne. He said he got Guinevere Turner because he felt the writing was weak in House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark. (I didn’t quite hear him, but I think he also put in a dig about Tara Reid when mentioning Alone in the Dark as well.) Interestingly, Guinevere Turner co-wrote American Psycho (with the director Mary Harron), which I really thought was a great movie. I enjoyed it even more than the book. However, I think the story for Bloodrayne was pretty awful. Anyway, Uwe wanted to get her to do it, so she could write about Rayne’s struggle as a woman. He then started talking about Bloodrayne 3 and how he was going to get Kristanna Loken to reprise her role as Rayne. I should have used this opportunity to mention that I preferred Natassia Malthe in Bloodrayne 2 to Kristanna, but I missed my chance. If Uwe is reading this, please make a note!

Anyway, perhaps I didn’t like Kristanna in Bloodrayne because the character Rayne wasn’t the Rayne from the games. My friends will know that I really liked the Bloodrayne games. I get a lot of crap for it, but I genuinely enjoyed them. Part of the reason is because the story is like a campy cult classic. Rayne always has a super cheesy one liner for every situation that is cringe worthy. However, it really works with the campy settings. I really enjoyed the character and the stories because of that. A Bloodrayne movie that delivers on the promise of the game would have a special place in my heart like other cult classics Plan Nine from Outer Space and The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension. However, in Bloodrayne the film, instead of a confident wisecracker, Rayne was emo and internally torn between the human and the vampire worlds. I asked if he was going to make the character of Rayne more similar to the video games rather than the struggling character from the film. He said yeah, he was going to make it similar to the games since each movie takes place a decade later, and they were going back to the fighting Nazis idea, which is completely brilliant. If you are making a game or movie, have the character fight Nazis or zombies – the two most hated concepts in the entire world. Or if you are particularly brilliant like Treyarch, have the player fight Nazi zombies.

At this point, I was running out of questions, so I figured I’d ask a standard one - what video game movie he would want to make if he could make any. He said he really wanted to make a World of Warcraft movie, but now that he’s done In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, he’s gotten the whole fantasy/Lord of the Rings thing out of his system. He mentioned he wanted to do Hitman and Silent Hill, but others got the rights. He also wanted to do Metal Gear Solid, but he couldn’t get the rights. Finally he said that he’d want to make a Grand Theft Auto film. He said it’d have to be really brutal to capture the feeling of the game. If they’d try and make it PG-13, it’d be complete trash.

I couldn’t really come up with any more questions off the top of my head and was feeling a little guilty since I had hogged the microphone for pretty much the entire session so far, so I decided to relinquish my control to see if anyone else was interested in querying the controversial director. There were no takers. Eventually a woman who said she was on the Michael Paré fan forum or something thanked him for some interview that he did for her and said the turnout was only poor because of the weather and that it had snowed in LA. I didn’t encounter any snow on my way there, and I have trouble imagining it was cold enough elsewhere in the sprawl to snow (it was raining though), but perhaps she was correct.

That pretty much ended the Q&A session. Michael Paré and his friends left, but a few more people showed up so we were at 9 for the US premiere of Far Cry. How was Far Cry you ask? About par for the Boll course. The plot was pretty much nonsensical, the action wasn’t very good, it wasn’t very exciting and there was a terrible romance shoe-horned in. As well, there was a really bad comedic relief character that followed the protagonist around along with the clichéd reporter bimbo that gets in over her head and needs him to save her (and screw her, which was surprisingly not shown considering Uwe’s previous films seemed to cater to lowest common denominator). The supposed comedic relief character wasn’t the least bit funny and was completely excess baggage. The female character was completely unnecessary as well, so I feel like they did the Sonic Team adaptation to Far Cry – take the action hero and add a bunch of worthless characters to surround him and waste your time.

Anyway, that’s what happened to the best of my recollection. If I misquoted Uwe or remembered something wrong, I sincerely apologize. I’m sure if he reads this he won’t be too thrilled that I find his movies bad, but remember! I find them so bad that I enjoy them. I’m one of his few devoted fans, so I’ll keep seeing all of his movies (unless he beats me up in a boxing match). I even brought my Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead DVDs to be signed (I also have Bloodrayne, but I lent it to a friend and haven’t gotten it back yet), so I’m definitely supporting his work financially!

As I mentioned, I talked to Jessica a bit because she was sitting near me, and she was really nice. She mentioned that Kristanna Loken will be there tomorrow, so if you are an autograph hound or a fan of her work as Rayne or the T-X, be sure to show up! I’m sure Uwe will appreciate it if the turnout is a little better than 9… There’s another Q&A session tomorrow, so you can get all your Uwe questions answered since I won’t be there, so I’m sure the mic will be free.

How to Get a Kick Pad Working with Rock Band0
Matt posted in Games on December 4th, 2008

As I posted previously, I was thinking about getting a kick pad and trying to get it to work with Rock Band. Well, I puchased one and failed to get it working. Like I mentioned previously, the Hi-hat pedal is just a switch, and the kick pad did not work with that input since it behaves similarly to the other pads in the kit. (You can try and plug a regular pad into the bass drum pedal input and it doesn’t really work.) I posted a message on the Rock Band forum, and someone was kind enough to point out the Rock Band Kick Box. It ends up being $77.50 with shipping if you are in the US, so it’s not a cheap solution. That cost more than my Yamaha KP65 Kick Pad, which ran me $50.99 for a blemished unit. (Their regular price is $59.99, but they were back ordered) However, it should allow me to rock out with a real bass drum pedal, so I’ll let you know how it works. Figured I’d pass along the info for anyone else interested in a true drumming experience.

ION Drum Rocker: Rock Band Premium Drum Kit Review4
Matt posted in Games, Xbox 360 on November 23rd, 2008

I started drumming 15 years ago, so I have very strong opinions about the state of drums in video games. As a disclaimer, I’m not the world’s greatest drummer nor am I the greatest guy at Rock Band drums (mostly because I have not played it very much due to my constant work schedule and the fact that my neighbors complain if I drums late), so take my opinions worth a grain of salt.

I have pretty much all the drumming games and their associated drums. I have 2 Taiko drum controllers, the US version of Taiko Drum Master, 2 Import only Taiko no Tatsujin PS2 games, 1 PSP Taiko no Tatsujin (I haven’t gotten the DS one yet, which makes a lot more sense than the PSP one), 4 Donkey Konga Bongos, Donkey Konga 1 and 2, DK Jungle Beat (which I haven’t actually opened yet… I didn’t care for it at E3, so mostly I bought it because it was cheap and I got another set of bongos), Guitar Freaks & Drummania 5 (this is another Japanese import), the Drummania drum controller, Rock Band 1 and 2, the Rock Band 1 drum set and finally the ION Rocker Premium Drum Kit.

I think I’m in a good position to say this drum kit is BY FAR the best video game peripheral that has been released for drumming.  I hope for my wallet’s sake that they don’t release anything better than this (or they sell upgrades for this unit). It’s a great kit, and I’m very glad I’ve purchased it. I just want to get that out of the way up front because I’m quite long winded, so you can stop reading if that’s all you were looking for. My full thoughts are as follows, and they include a lot of nitpicky comments that probably don’t matter to non-drummers and even still, don’t affect the enjoyment of the game. So the summary is it’s great, and I like nitpicking.

Starting from the very beginning, for $300 you get a big box packed to the brim of drummy goodness. (I purchased mine from amazon.com because they have free shipping unlike the official ION Rocker site) It’s a bit larger than the full Rock Band package. Contained inside is all the various racks, stands and drum pads necessary to create a semi-realistic drum kit. One of the best features about the kit is the modularity. It is made up of many aluminum tubes and plastic joints, which gives you a lot of flexibility as far as positioning. Every drummer has a personal preference as to the locations of all their drums, cymbals and pedals. It takes quite a lot of time to position them in order to get the kit to feel right. Unfortunately, with all previous kits there was not a way to fine-tune the positions. Luckily, the ION Drum Rocker allows the level of control drummers have expected from drum kits both normal and electronic. 

The main pads are quite nice. They have a good feel to them similar to many practice pads that drummers use for training. One important thing to note is that unlike the traditional Rock Band kits pads, they have rims that do not register your hits. This is accurate for real drums as well as most electronic kits. Unfortunately, unlike the expensive electronic kits, the rims aren’t sensitive to hits, so you can’t do any rim shots. It’s not too important for the game, but would be a neat little touch. Perhaps you should only get half points if you missed the note and hit the rim, but it wouldn’t end your streak. It’d be a cool gameplay touch, but they are selling the kit for $300, so I didn’t expect it to include a lot of advanced features like that. Although the rims register a hit on the official kit, they don’t register as a separate rim shot sound. Rather they are just molded from the center pad creating a more forgiving experience despite that hurts the drum simulator aspect of it.

Continuing with the nitpickiness - although there is quite a lot of flexibility in positioning, all the joints are made out of plastic. They seem pretty solid, but feel a little cheap. However, as a nice touch, most of the screws have the typical square peg found on most drum heads and other equipment. If you have a lucky drum key, you can put it to good use to create an authentic game experience. Maybe you can even find a roadie to set it up for you.

The bass drum pedal, although quite a bit better than the Rock Band plastic pedal, still does not feel like a real bass drum pedal. It has a lot of travel before it hits the switch, and the switch is purely binary. Although all the pads are velocity sensitive, the bass drum is not. This isn’t that big of a deal, but a velocity sensitive pedal would be cool since dynamics are one of the few tools a drummer has, and using an electronic kit always takes away many of the options. For example, depending on where you hit cymbals they make different sounds. Playing the bell of your ride cymbal creates a super cool sound that is great for hard hitting metal songs. In fact, Zildjian makes a Zil-Bell, which is just like the bell of a cymbal, so you can make another unique sound in your kit. Anyway, electronic drum sets have some advantages like size, ease of recording and not pissing off your neighbors. But especially if you are planning on hooking up the pedal to a real electronic drum set module preserving the volume control is very important.

Ideally, they’d sell an optional bass drum trigger pad that would allow you to use any sort bass drum pedal. This is usually what electronic drum sets do. Most non-drummers may not be interested in paying more than $300 for a more authentic experience, but some drummers like myself already have pedals they like, so it might be worth it to some. If you are looking to get serious, the best bass drum pedal back when I kept up with drumming was the Tama Iron Cobra line of pedals. If you go to a music store and try one out, you’ll know the difference instantly. However, I’d even prefer a cheap pedal to the pedal they have because real bass drum pedals allow drummers to adjust the spring tension, which goes a long way to help drummers get the best bass drumming experience. Again, this may not make a difference to most consumers, but if they are targeting the enthusiast market, it might be worth providing this. I’m tempted to buy an electronic bass drum trigger and see if I can get it working with the kit. If I do, I’ll let you know if I can get it working.

The bass drum pedal appears to be identical to an Alesis hi-hat pedal. The fact that it’s binary is especially unfortunate for a hi-hat pedal because the hi-hat is one of the most versatile instruments at a drummer’s disposal. Because you can adjust the tension of the hi hat with the pedal, you can create a whole range of sounds when hitting it. Whether the pedal works well for a hi-hat is a bit of a moot point since Rock Band doesn’t have hi-hat support. I would really like to see Rock Band 3 add a hi-hat pedal since developing four limb independence is important to train the future of drummers trained on the game.

Interestingly, the Rock Band 2 drum set has an input for a second pedal, but the ION Drum Rocker does not. I’m worried I may have to buy a new little brain for any new features that are added in the next iteration. The brain is not a sophisticated piece of electronics because all it does is encode the inputs from the trigger pads to whatever format they use over USB. I imagine it could sell for $30 if they wanted, but I have a feeling they aren’t going to charge that little should you want to upgrade it. It would be nice if they sold the modules individually so the few people that want to switch between platforms don’t need a new kit. A lot of my friends have the PS3 Rock Band, so theoretically I might want to have both copies, so I can play with all my friends. I’m not devoted enough to do that, but I can totally see people wanting to switch when there may be platform exclusive content or in the case of Rock Band 2 an exclusive early release. $300 is a sizable investment, and I want to future proof my investment. If Sony buys Harmonix from MTV and Rock Band 3 is a PS3 exclusive, I don’t want to buy another kit. (I don’t really see that happening, but I like having all my bases covered)

So again, the kit is awesome. If you are serious with drumming, it’s definitely worth $300. It’s not the greatest electronic drum kit ever, and if you are serious about drumming, it’s probably worth buying a real drum kit to use for practice. There is quite a bit of room for improvement as far as realism, but I imagine price was a big factor as far as what features they chose to include. Konami’s Drummania Japanese PS2 games actually support real electronic drum kits using a midi to USB converter, so if you think any of my complaints would bother you or you want to drop $1000 on an electronic drum kit, that’s an option. Their song selection is no where near as rockin’ as Rock Band, so it might not be that great of an idea.

Let me close with a random thought. I used to play a mean marimba. I could even do the 4 mallet thing, which was really tough (at least for me). Any chance someone will make Marimba Hero? Maybe I should trademark that in the off chance someone does. I guess I’d have to get Xylophone Hero and Vibraphone Hero just in case they wanted to get around my trademark. Keep your fingers crossed that they create rhythm games for other forms of percussion. I could totally see Harmonix’s Symphonic Orchestra having an awesome Timpani controller.

Announcing Retro/grade, the first game from 24 Caret!1
Matt posted in Games, My Work on November 5th, 2008

24 Caret Games is proud to announce Retro/grade, our first game from our brand new company. You can check out the official website for more information: http://www.retrogradegame.com

It’s already shaping up to be a very fun and unique fusion of the rhythm and shmup genres. As well, I think we may be the world’s first game that is played entirely in reverse. I have played a lot of games, and I can’t think of any where you not only go backwards in time but can control your ship. Doing the entire game in reverse has presented a lot of interesting challenges. Most games that play back in reverse (for example, Full Auto, Braid, etc) are just recording what happened and playing it backwards. We have to instead create all the motion backwards and make it look convincing. I wasn’t sure we did a good job until I was working on our trailer and reversed our video and audio. If you watch the trailer, the first part is actually just our game reversed. The only difference is I muted the music and added the music track later in order to have one consistent music track play throughout the trailer. So, our game really does behave like a shooter in reverse.

Anyway, take a look at the teaser and let me know what you think.

Gameplay Programming Tips: Hermite Curves0
Matt posted in Gameplay Programming on September 12th, 2008

Creating motion is an important thing in games. Very few games consist of only completely static objects, so odds are as a gameplay programmer, you are going to spend a lot of time defining the motion of objects. One interesting problem you will probably face as a gameplay programmer is when you want a nice smooth curve and you only know a start position, start direction, end position and end direction. Although you may think this may not be enough information to formulate a path (and strictly speaking it isn’t, but I’ll get to that later), there is a simple, elegant and efficient way to compute that using Hermite Curves. In order to follow this math, you need knowledge of basic linear algebra (matrix multiplication, transposing and inversion) and basic calculus (differentiating).

Firstly, the basic equation for a cubic is In order to simplify the math, we can write the equation as  where and .

As well, using simple calculus, you can get the derivative of x with respect to time.

Now, let’s start defining more equations based on what we know.




These equations can be written as where and .

Premultiplying by the inverse of , we get . Since is known, plugging that into the previous equation we get . is also known as the Hermite Basis Matrix, and is easy to calculate.

So now, you can find out your cubic equation with a matrix multiply. However, In order to make this work better with a math library that doesn’t support column vectors, note that . If that statement is a little confusing, let’s do the math:

If you noticed the only difference between those two quantities is the first has brackets around it, you’d be right. The fact that one solution is a 1×1 matrix and the other is a regular scalar value doesn’t make any difference for our purposes. So, using some more basic linear algebra: . This is a better format anyway because now we are multiplying a row vector by a 4×4 matrix, which should be something easily computable with standard math libraries. So finally, let’s say .

You can find the cubic equation coefficients easily because

This is an efficient way to evaluate a cubic when you have a vector processor that supports a dot instruction. You can store as a vector intrinsic, and when you want to evaluate it, you compute and dot it with . As well, (your cubic equation coefficients) can be found with just by multiplying the known quantities () with a constant matrix, so that is easy to do as well. Isn’t that elegant?

Although we solved the equations for , but the same math applies to and . Basically each component will have an independent cubic equation that is solved by multiplying by this equation.

Now back to what I said earlier. Just the direction is not enough information. The values in are the tangent, which has a direction and magnitude. The tangent is the derivative of the curve at the point, which is the rate of change. For a position function, the rate of change is the velocity. However, we have a cubic function with a parametric

Although we solved the equations for parameter, which isn’t the same as time in seconds or whatever your unit is. You can convert it to whatever units you’d like by using dimensional analysis. Yes, that High School chemistry knowledge comes in handy in game development after all.

So, if you know what speed you want the particle to start out at and end at, you can solve for the exact cubic. However, your cubic solution may not look how you expect because there is one solution with the limited information and there’s no guarantee that it will be visually appealing. Usually I tweak the start and exit speeds to find something that looks good with values in the ranges that I’d expect to encounter.

Another thing to note is that your object moving along the curve will not move at a constant speed. The curve’s tangent magnitude varies significantly. If you want to move at a constant speed along the path that this generates, you would need to solve the equation for the arc length evaluated from to . Unfortunately, finding the general equation for arc length for a cubic is extremely complicated, so this probably isn’t a good approach for real time applications. You can either iteratively estimate it or estimate it by dividing your desired world space speed by the magnitude of the tangent vector. However, in many situations, the cubic path works just fine.

There are other curve methods that you can use to interpolate between two points that may suite your needs better for whatever particular problem you are trying to solve. The secret to gameplay programming is try as many different things as you have time for and see which one works the best. For a reference on Hermite curves and some other curve methods, check out this webpage.

Intro to Gameplay Programming0
Matt posted in Gameplay Programming on September 11th, 2008

Since the beginning of my career, I’ve focused on gameplay programming. Gameplay programming seems like it’s becoming a standard position at many game development studios. Unfortunately for people who are interested in programming games but aren’t in the industry, I haven’t found a very good definition of what exactly gameplay programming is. As well, I haven’t found as many sites carrying tips and tricks that are very useful in a gameplay programmer’s toolbox. (If you know of any, feel free to suggest them in the comments) I’ll try and offer some good tricks I’ve picked up over the years when I have time.
 
So, what IS gameplay programming anyway? It’s the most fun and exciting discipline that game development has to offer! Well, that’s just my opinion, but this blog is my opinion, so hopefully you are interested in what I think. Gameplay programmer tasks can vary significantly from studio to studio. The player logic is almost always done by a gameplay programmer. At studios with data driven design, it involves creating the enemies, widgets and other building blocks that designers use to create an enjoyable experience. At other studios, it can mean that you are given free rein to implement something fun based on a rough sketch that a designer provides. Everything that goes into the level is created by a gameplay programmer including doors, background characters, and sometimes even in engine cutscenes. (For more info about data driven design, here’s my thoughts)

Some studios have designer positions that are basically analogous to gameplay programmers but are called scripters and work in some sort of game engine scripting language (UnrealScript, Lua, Python, etc) rather than C/C++/assembly. (Although I have written very little in assembly, it’s important to be comfortable with it because otherwise, it’s difficult to debug crashes off of discs) I am of the opinion that scripting languages are a bad idea unless you are going to invest the time to make a debugger for your scripting language, but that’s a big time investment. Debugging a scripting language from something either parsing text (for an interpreted scripting language) or executing byte code (for a language that compiles but not to the native instruction set) is a real pain to do, and usually scripting languages don’t have that much convenience over C/C++ (in my opinion anyway).

Gameplay programming is very challenging because gameplay programmers need to have strong design sensibilities and a good handle on how to make something fun. Fun unfortunately cannot be quantified or defined in a word doc or even in a conversation, so good gameplay programmers need to be able to create something fun without a designer telling them what for every iteration. Although usually gameplay code is not the performance bottleneck in most games, it’s important to have a good sense for performance and tricks you can use to create something big and exciting without dropping frames. One of the most important things for gameplay programmers is the ability to create stuff quickly and make it flexible, since gameplay is always evolving to try and make it more fun.

Finally, gameplay programmers end up creating a lot of effects. In the future, there will probably be many specialized effects programmers doing that, but so far in my career, the gameplay programmers have always done the effects. If you are bad at creating effects, there’s still plenty of work for a gameplay programmer to do like AI, various widgets and player control.

So, hopefully I’ve given a decent introduction to gameplay programming. If you have any questions, leave a message. As well, I will try and offer some tips and tricks related to it here in the future.