Thoughts on the Wii U

Since not all the information is available on the Xbox One or the PS4, I can't fully judge what they have to offer, but from what they have shown, I don't see anything really they're offering that really changes how games will be made.  Prettier graphics, more advanced motion controls I don't want that will be foisted upon me, and (so far) no games I have any interest in.  This made me feel even better about my purchase of the Wii U because the Wii U actually offers something new and unique to game designers to play with - a secret screen for only one player to see.

So far I have only played Nintendo Land and that for only one evening with a group of friends, so it's still mostly about the potential of the Wii U than anything concrete, but what I have seen so far has amazed me.  Three minigames of Nintendo Land, all with a similar premise: one player with the Gamepad containing extra information not available to the other players vs. four other players who really must work as a team to defeat the solo player.  In one game, the four are trying to catch the one, in the other two, the one is trying to catch the four.  This is precisely what I love about the Wii U's new game possibilities - the ability to have players having different experiences with the same game.  Nintendo originally had this same mechanic with the Game Boy Advance connecting with the Gamecube in Zelda Four Swords and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.  The downside of those was that you had to have friends who each had not only their own GBA, but also the cable that connects the GBA to the Gamecube.  With the Wii U, I can have all the various gadgets needed and my friends merely need to bring their wonderful smiles.  Of course, the battery life on the gamepad is pretty poor, but it looks like (hopefully) that won't be an issue much longer.

I look forward to when more games come out and I can see how the Wii U works for single player experiences.  This has really been the reason the Wii U hasn't been doing well (and why the 3DS had such a slow start), but with all the announcements of things coming out starting in August (hooray Pikmin 3!), that shouldn't be a problem much longer.  We'll see what Sony and Microsoft have to offer at E3 in a couple weeks, but at this point, I feel like they'd have to offer quite a bit to get my interest (especially Microsoft).

TV Shows I Grew Up On: Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Continuing with the Nickelodeon theme, another great show I watched as a kid was Are You Afraid of the Dark?  I'm not asking a question...that's its name...The general premise of the show is that a bunch of kids, members of The Midnight Society, sit around a campfire telling each other scary/bizarre/supernatural stories.  Each episode was one of those stories played out for the viewer.  Occasionally the story would be interrupted by the other Midnight Society members, which reminded you this was being told around a campfire.  It always started and ended at the campfire and (as in most kid show fashion) the story would generally be relevant to what one of the kids was doing at the beginning of the story (if one of the kids was being a jerk, the story would be about someone being a jerk getting punished in a scary way, etc.).

I loved this show because of how varied the stories were and how not every story was scary.  Some were just paranormal without any kids being in danger.  Then there were the ones with the clowns...this probably is part of the cause for my aversion to clowns.  This and Tim Curry.  It probably also helps that one of the very first episodes I saw had lizard people and a giant sewer dragon/lizard thing.  The Goosebumps TV show came out near the end of this show, but it wasn't comparable at all other than they were both scary story shows.  This show was far superior in every way.

Things I'm Looking Forward To This Summer

• Movies
• Much Ado About Nothing - June 7th
• Joss Whedon does Shakespeare, need I say more?
• Monsters University - June 21st
• Prequel to Monsters Inc.
• Despicable Me 2 - July 3rd
• Sequel to the amazing movie Despicable Me
• Pacific Rim - July 12th
• Essentially King of the Monsters the movie
• The Wolverine - July 26th
• Another Wolverine focused movie, this time set in Japan
• Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters - August 16th
• Another movie based on the Percy Jackson books that I really want to read at some point because I liked the previous movie a lot
• Riddick - September 6th
• Another Riddick movie
• Television
• MasterChef - Started May 22nd
• Cooking competition between more average people than Top Chef
• Arrested Development - New Season released May 26th
• If you have not seen this series before, do it.  You must watch from the beginning for full effect.
• Video Games
• Fuse - May 28th
• Co-op sci-fi adventure with a couple buddies of mine
• Remember Me - June 4th
• Cyberpunk adventure about rewriting people's memories
• The Last Of Us - June 14th
• Survival horror after a fungal infection has taken over most of humanity
• Pikmin 3 - August 4th
• Control an army of little vegetable creatures to gather amazing "treasures" on a distant planet
• Mario and Luigi Dream Team - August 11th
• Another amazing RPG adventure for Mario and Luigi
• New Super Luigi U - August 25th
• Redoing of New Super Mario Bros. U focused on Luigi
• The Wonderful 101 - September 15th
• Control an army of superheroes to save the city (essentially another Pikmin!)
• Batman: Arkham Origins - October 25th
• A prequel to the two other amazing Batman Arkham games
• Other
• Pacificon Game Expo - August 30th-September 2nd
• Playing games all weekend and demoing Suspicion to complete strangers
• Suspicion Demo at Game Habitat - Tentatively June 1st
• Suspicion Demo at Illusive Comics and Games - Tentatively June 15th

The Downfall of Sitcoms

I've watched quite a few sitcoms in my day and I think I've started to narrow down one of the biggest differences between a good one and a bad one: the avoidability of the ridiculous situations that arise.  Sitcoms are all about taking real life situations to utterly ridiculous extremes.  In fact, I think it can probably be charted much like the Hot Crazy Scale.  The simpler it would be to diffuse a given situation, the less ridiculous the situation should get.  So for example, in this episode of Frasier, Frasier needs to get a book of his from Daphne's room and instead of waiting until she gets home and asking, he goes into her room to find it.  Now because it's a sitcom (and Frasier's an idiot), he doesn't just stop when he gets the book, but instead keeps looking through Daphne's stuff.  Daphne then comes in and (rightly so) gets super upset with him.  So if this is as far as it went, it would only be mildly stupid.  But, of course, it keeps escalating.  In his rush to get out of the room (instead of explaining what he was doing to Daphne), Frasier ends up taking a bottle of pills from Daphne's room.  Now, again, instead of apologizing to Daphne and explaining what an idiot he is, he decides to sneak in and put the bottle of pills back and ends up hiding around the room while Daphne comes in to undress and take a shower.  Later, both Frasier, his brother Niles (who is in love with Daphne), and their father are all sneaking around in her room to try to fix the situation only to spill wine everywhere and act like complete imbeciles with zero control over their own bodies.

A part of sitcom humor does seem to depend on the characters acting very stupid most of the time, but if they act so stupid so as not to be even remotely like a normal human being or stupid one episode and totally normal another, that makes it very hard to find the stupidity funny.  I think this sort of thing always happens at some point to any sitcom, so the question is how long a sitcom can last without depending on this large failure.  Or at the very least good writers can try to explain why the characters' brains stopped functioning momentarily.  The very worst case is that character becomes the dumb character and perpetually gets dumber and dumber.  I'm looking at you, Joey Tribbiani.

TV Shows I Grew Up On: Legends of the Hidden Temple

When I was writing last week's Blank I Grew Up On, it made me think of another wonderful game show found on Nickelodeon (I might end up having a Nickelodeon game show theme for the next couple weeks come to think of it...), Legends of the Hidden Temple.  Each episode would start with six pairs of kids competing to see which pair would get to find this week's treasure in the hidden temple.  Each episode had a theme filled with historical facts and questions about some different artifact.

The contest was split into three elimination challenges.  First, the six teams must cross a moat with whatever method they are told to use (swing across using ropes, use a raft, swim, etc.  The first four teams to completely cross first and hit the button on the other side continue to the next round: The Steps of Knowledge.  The remaining four teams answer trivia questions to step down from the steps of knowledge.  Each right answer moves the team down another step.  The first two teams to the bottom of the stairs move on to the final round of team elimination.  The last two teams compete in different physical challenges that fit that episode's theme to earn parts of pendants of life.  After three of these competitions, the team with more pendant parts get to run through the hidden temple and try to find the artifact and bring it back out for the grand prize.

The temple itself is a large maze of various rooms that each have some trick or method to access adjacent rooms.  Contestants are told which room the artifact is in and must find their way into that room and get back out of the temple within a time limit to win.  However, there are three temple guards hidden within the temple that are out to catch them.  Generally, the guards were hidden along the prescribed path to get to the artifact in places the contestants were likely to trigger.  That is, if a player had to find a button in a sarcophagus to open the door and the room had multiple sarcophagi, then a guard would probably be in one of the others.  If the contestants had a full pendant of life, they could give it to the guard to keep going through the temple.  At most, a team could have 1.5 pendants of life from the last round of team elimination and another half was in the temple somewhere along the path they were meant to follow.  However, most teams only ever had one and so would be eliminated when the third guard was found (the first guard took the pendant, the second guard captured kid 1 of the team, and the third guard captured kid 2).

I always wondered if the kids had to travel along a certain path (the one the audience was shown/told about before the team entered the temple) or if they were free to try going other ways.  If they could only ever go along a certain path that it seemed designed to never let a team win ever.  I guess some teams did win, but I never witnessed these episodes.  This sort of goes along the lines of Nick Arcade where I understand that not every team can win, but at the same time it seemed unnecessarily harsh.  Of course, other times the kids were just idiots.

The Illusion of Danger

One of the lectures I went to for my first GDC was "Everything I Learned About Game Design, I Learned From Disneyland", by Scott Rogers.  It was filled with all sorts of wonderful ideas and lessons, but one of the ones that has really stuck with me was the illusion of danger.  A couple examples of this from Disneyland would be the "darts" in the Indiana Jones ride (before they lowered the air pressure) that actually felt like real darts or the splashes of water from the cannonballs in Pirates of the Caribbean.  Neither of these dangers are real and everyone knows this, but it still adds to the thrill of these rides.

This false sense of danger is even more important in video games to give a similar thrill to the players.  Uncharted seemingly does a great job of this because Nathan Drake is almost always seemingly just about to fall to his death or barely escape from a runaway train.  However, this sense of danger is only if the player keeps moving.  If you stand still on that pipe that will obviously break when you jump off of it, it will (usually) stay in place indefinitely until you move.  So the obvious solution to this would be to have the pipe actually break if you stay on it after say 5 seconds or so.  Another good example is if enemies in the background are shooting at you, they should all miss you unless you stand still for a little bit.  This will give the illusion that you have to skillfully dodge the enemy fire, but without having players frustrated trying to focus on both the foreground action and background action at the same time.

This sense of tension and imminent danger can sort of be mimicked in board games by having the game balanced such that the line between winning and losing is very fine.  If it's a cooperative game, then the ideal ending would be the players barely making it through the harrowing adventure or possibly losing someone on the way (bonus points if you can mimic the stereotypical blaze of glory or grand sacrifice seen in action movies).  If it's competitive, then making all players a threat to the current winner will keep that feeling of danger going.  This is definitely the aspect of the illusion of danger I'd like to work on some more in my future games.

Paper Prototyping For Work vs. Board Game Design For Fun

• Paper Prototyping For Work
• Pros
• Getting paid for doing what I love
• Having people immediately available to ask for help/advice
• Cabinet filled with game prototype materials (legal pads/pens/paper clips/etc)
• Nearby cafe for lunch breaks
• Cons
• Less control over project direction
• Frequent misunderstandings between current progress and full game design
• Working with a bunch of people (myself included at times) who want to jump ahead to programming the game before it's fully designed
• Meetings
• Board Game Design For Fun
• Pros
• Can watch TV while working
• Can bring my dog to work
• Full kitchen to cook my own food for lunch breaks
• Can work in my pajamas
• No deadlines or crunch time
• Cons
• Must pay for prototype components/scavenge other board games
• Have a dog to interrupt working
• A little too easy to become a full fledged hermit