LVL Headed

I came back from work today only to find some newspaper-clippings from New Orleans on my dresser.  The article within states that Electronic Arts is opening up a large testing center in Baton Rouge thanks to Louisiana’s new incentives for electronic entertainment companies.

I drove 2,000 miles across the U.S. of A., only to find that the games industry is branching out only 4 hours from where I used to live.  I spent four days in a car to get a job I now could have gotten without worrying about getting a new driver’s license.

Oh well.  It’s still better here.

I was thinking about trading card games today, and as I just want to chronicle this idea, this won’t be a long post.

I’ve played with the idea of time as a resource before.  As part of my Independent Project at Centenary College, I created a card game in which player’s cards had a limited amount of turns in play which could be manipulated a few ways in order to create a winning strategy.

But today I saw a card from the Street Fighter collectible card game, and it got me thinking about other ways to use time.  I’ve heard of other trading card games that go without turns in “real time,” meaning players are just laying down cards as quickly as they can.  I don’t think I would be into that, I’d like to give my games a little more thinking time.

Then I thought about timers.  Perhaps a special timer.  Each player would have a certain amount of seconds for their turn, and each card would cost time.  The timer would count down from, oh, lets say 30 seconds, but there would be buttons to subtract time from the timer for each card.  That way, the longer players thought about their turn, the less they would be able to do with it.  That just might make it like a real fight!

I’m going to keep this here so I can remember it.  If you stumble upon this, let me know what you think.

This week I got angry.  I read an article on Gamasutra by Ernest Adams (of No Twinkie Database fame) entitled “The Tao of Game Design.”  And during the process of reading, I felt the kind of inner-excitement I only feel when I disagree with something.

So to say that I became angry isn’t quite true.  It’s just that my vice is debate, and so when I spot something I disagree with I gain an urge to speak out against it, an urge that just won’t go away until I fall into temptation.

So if you now look at the end of the article in the comments section, you can see some of the “excited” messages I left.  If you need to know, I post under my name: Steven Turner.

Now it’s been a few days, and after looking back at it, I see what bothered me.  It wasn’t what he was trying to say, it was the details.  His point was good, but he lead up to it with things that, first of all, I still don’t think are correct (his observations about media, his juxtaposition of making a game fun or making it meaningful), and second of all, didn’t really have anything to do with his main point.  It was an awkward article, full of the kinds of assumptions that tweak me, full of filler, but with a decent (but definetly not eye-opening or discipline-expanding) conclusion.

To really get what Adams was saying, I recommend that you don’t read the article.  Instead, read the comment left towards the end by one Jacek Wesołowski.  You’ll get the point and you’ll understand it better.

For now, I’m going to try and let the technical stuff lie.  I know in my heart of hearts that Adams wasn’t really suggesting that fun games and meaningful games are diametrically opposed to one another, or that games are the only medium which require participation and thought from both the designer and the reader (technically, they all do), it’s just that he was probably trying to stretch out his essay a little bit.

So to Adams, who will very likely never read this…

Sorry.

The above video is from Game Trailers, with the narrator explaining some of the decisions made in the new Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe game.  I haven’t been keeping up with this game that much since I’m a diehard Marvel vs Capcom 2 fan (I’ll take Wolverine vs Megaman over Superman vs Scorpion anyday), but I just found this video a little interesting and odd.

The first thing gone over in the video is the inclusion of Superman and how the developers took his powers into account when making the game.  So how did the game developers manage to balance the game while keeping the characters true to their roots?  They did it with a plot device.

I was hoping for something cool, as if the developers had locked themselves in a room for months just trying to figure out “How do we make Superman a normal fighter?”  But instead we get some excuse about how Superman is weak against Kryptonite and magic, and since Mortal Kombat takes place in a universe of sorcery, everything works out just fine on its own.  Even this plot device excuse is a little weak, seeing as how in the video Scorpion is hurting Superman just by punching him.  Does Scorpion have magic fists?  Is this explained in story mode as well?

This seems to me just another example of how awkward these two themes fit together.  If they had said something along the lines of Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe Villains, then I could see how that would work out.  Both fighters from either side would come into the battle with the same goal - total havok.  But to have the Flash fight some guy with a bicycle kick and expect us to think it’s totally rational?  Does the Flash have a fatality?

I’ll admit that Marvel vs Capcom 2 kind of has the same problem, and I’ve already stated I love that game.  But Marvel vs Capcom just goes right around the issue.  There’s no plot, no reason, just a bunch of people duking it out.  Marvel vs Capcom doesn’t try to explain itself, it just is.  Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe could try doing the same, but then the basic premise of fighting and fatalities is comprimised by DC’s do-gooders.  It’s not just in the storyline where the two mis-match, it’s in the basic theme.

Anyways, I just thought this was weird.

A decade from now I will turn to my cyborg grandchildren, and I will tell them “I was there.” And I will also tell them “It kind of sucked.”

Yesterday was the opening of the 4th annual I Am 8-Bit art show, and it was right here in Los Angeles. I owned the art book and I love games, so of course I had to go. Only it wasn’t so much of an art show as it was just a big party. We waited in line around the corner to get in and the place was packed with people hanging out and talking and dancing and drinking (If I remember correctly, the event was sponsored by Colt 45). When we finally did get in, it was pretty difficult to work our way around the people just standing around and partying to look at the (wonderful) art hanging on the walls.

In the first paragraph, I said it kind of sucked. This is not in any way because of the artwork inside. It was all beautiful and creative and wondrous, and it made me proud to be a part of the culture. I’ll try to go back some time and append some pictures into this post, though I’m sure you could just google it and find pictures on any other site. No, it wasn’t the art, it was the atmosphere. It was as if nobody gave a damn about the artwork. I think one of the pieces had been broken, and I witnessed some guy leaning against a wall-sized canvas painting. Leaning on it. Butt rubbing against it, faced the other way just so he could look at the DJ.

Unbelievable.

The evening ended pretty well though as I did get one of the wonderful MegaMan 9 posters. I can’t wait for that friggin’ game to come out.