Supple Think: May 2008

You heard it here first.

by Zen

Posted on Saturday, May 31, 2008
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We've only seen Snake tooling around the Middle East because that's the game's prologue. The rest of the game you play as Johnny Sasaki while Otacon tries to make love bloom with Big Mama.
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To Begin Your Adventure, Turn to Paragraph 1

by Tupperwarez

Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008
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Have you ever heard of Choose Your Own Adventure books? Those stories that were cut up into sections that you could navigate through, resulting in a story that had multiple endings, mostly involving horrible deaths? Sometime in the early 80's, several publishers got the notion to merge that concept with light RPG elements, like an inventory, simple combat system and player statistics.

There were a lot of these 'gamebooks' as they were called, with many series. One of the more successful series were the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series, both of which got started in the UK. But then computer and video games went on the up-and-up, Nintendo resurrected the home console market, and gamebooks were slowly but surely edged out of the limelight, dying a quiet death in the mid-90s. Some do live on, like the Lone Wolf series, now available for free on Project Aon, but most are only dimly remembered.

After reading through many gamebooks, I started to wonder if maybe they were one of the many precursors to video games. Not a direct ancestor like pinball tables and slot machines, but more a distant ancestor, like pen-and-paper RPGs. They started out as interactive novels, and then gradually evolved into what amounted to be solo role-playing game modules. Consider, you have a self-contained story with a concrete beginning and end, and a few differing paths that lead you to the end. Each adventure follows a core set of rules, but individual adventures may have additional, unique rules of their own.

What we're talking about here is some basic video game anatomy, I'd say. Only, instead of graphics, sound, and a computer processor, it's the prose and the player's imagination that help generate the game world. Additionally, writing a gamebook also requires design considerations that are similar to those of a video game. It demands efficiency, balance, and flow.

Because of these reasons, I think writing a gamebook would make for an interesting exercise in game design. In order to make it halfway decent, you're going to need a compelling plot. The plot needs to be alterable based on the player's choices, but it should also loosely follow a set path. Combat and other hazards need to be spaced out and balanced so as to not frustrate the player. And then you will need various 'error checking' devices, to check the state of the game and the player. Oh, and you have 350 to 400 'nodes' to use in order to accomplish this. The folks at the Fighting Fantasy Project also think that making a gamebook is an interesting notion, and have several home-brew Fighting Fantasy gamebooks up for your perusal.

While gamebooks are pretty much a forgotten medium, I find the 'what-if' scenarios amusing to think about. Would gamebooks have survived if computer and video games had not taken off like they did? I think they would have. I imagine various publishing companies competing with various rule systems. Pen-and-paper RPG companies getting in on the game with solo campaigns in gamebook form. Bootleg books made by home-brew writers, hastily xeroxed and stapled together. Open Gaming License analogues allowing independent writers to create, publish, and sell their own books that use existing rule sets.

But inevitably someone would figure out that you can add video and audio to electronic gamebooks, and then we'd be back on the path to video games again. This outcome is not too far off from what happened in reality, actually. Not that gamebooks birthed video games, but rather that gamebooks evolved and merged with video games, living on in spirit in text adventures, visual novels, and other forms of interactive fiction. Seems inevitable, I guess, that the limitations of a medium would force the craft to either evolve or stagnate.

Hopefully I've at least piqued your curiosity regarding this near-forgotten type of interactive fiction. You can find a positively encyclopedic listing of gamebooks at Demian's Gamebook Web Page if you've exhausted the other links I've provided. Article Permalink

This is really happening.

by Zen

Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008
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Right as I start to get really excited about Clover Studios and their new incarnation, Platinum Games, this announcement turns up. Four games! Here's my take:

Bayonetta: Hey, we're innovating on the Devil May Cry formula! Finally! I love all three Devil May Cry games, a lot, but hopefully this will finally make my dream of Viewtiful Joe-style time control combined with Devil May Cry action a reality. Interestingly enough, this is exactly the team that could do it and do it right.


Infinite Line: I never played Steel Battalion and we really have no info on this other than that it's a DS RPG, but there are no pieces of this puzzle so far that do not sex me up.


MadWorld: I love Nintendo consoles because I don't think videos games need to be violent to be fun, significant, or even awesome. That said, I like violent video games and think Nintendo needs more of them. Maybe one of these days I'll gush about No More Heroes, but for now it's enough to say that it tickled me in very private, very splendid ways. It was like an easygoing GOD HAND on the Wii, with absolutely sociopathic amounts of blood and arbitrary violence. MadWorld looks like it's going even further, as instead of making all the blood grey or whatever in Japan they are simply not going to release it there at all. This game will be indulgent, offensive, bloody, and on a Nintendo console. Make it happen.

Shinji Mikami: Yeah, he's working on a game. There are rumors that Suda 51 (the guy who made Killer 7 and No More Heroes) is involved. That's all we know, but I'm going to go ahead and pretend they're making GOD FOOT together.
Nothing can spoil this day. Article Permalink

2400 N81

by Zen

Posted on Monday, May 5, 2008
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For some time now I've been puzzling over just what the hell is so fun about the channels on the Wii. Everybody Votes is kind of neat, but only gives me anything to do every other day, and Check Mii Out is a great concept spoiled by the fact that everyone just votes for Harry Potter all the time. So why am I having so much fun with this stuff?

Back before Internet access was readily available, accessible, or affordable, I spent a lot of time as a kid dialing up local bulletin boards. There were lots of little cultures that developed around these, and the communities were tight-knit and usually really friendly. Since most boards had only one phone line, you'd log in, check all the messages, and get off the line to let other people come in and post. It was a simpler time, and the slower pace and local vibe held surprisingly little resemblance to the rapid-fire idle chatter of web-based boards today.

Sometimes, when a board got really fancy and someone was willing to shell out a few bucks or knew someone who had, it would have "door games". These were programs the board would drop you into that were usually pretty simple, but sometimes grew spectacularly complicated. All of this, with one notable exception, was done without much in the way of graphics or sound. Almost every one of these games rendered what visuals they had with the ANSI extended character set, making use of colors and symbols to draw pictures. These usually fell somewhere between ASCII art and MS Paint, but it wasn't uncommon to see fully animated scenes rendered this way. It's really amazing, looking back on it, how much people were able to squeeze out of the medium.

What got me thinking about all this again was the previews for Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King on WiiWare. So far the game sounds exactly like the empire-management sims I used to play on local BBSes. Solar Realms Elite, Barren Realms Elite, and Falcon's Eye were an awesome way to log in and spend ten minutes, making treaties with other players and waging war with your turns. There were trade agreements, different systems of government, and different ways to allocate your resources. My Life as a King similarly has you in the role of a monarch organizing his country to better encourage his subjects to spread his domain. It's all a bit like a cross between Falcon's Eye and Majesty, and it's too bad I can't see Squenix making the decision to give you ten in-game days each real day and letting you duke it out with people on your friends list, just like the BBS door games of the 90s.

As I get around to it, I'll maybe showcase a few of the standout games I used to play back in the day. It's a kind of video game that I simply never see anymore, and it's a shame since it's not one without merit. Some tried surviving the transition to real-time multiplayer, but it rarely worked. My great hope is that these kinds of games will find a place again on the Wii, alongside a program that lets you vote on something stupid every two days and decide whose Darth Vader is the best spaceship captain.

I get disappointed a lot.
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Keep fighting, make the future brighter.

by alzabo

Posted on
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Street Fighter IV is going to land in our sticky little hands eventually and Capcom hopes that people who don't worshop at the alter of Street Fighter will buy it. Capcom's promotion of the title with slick screen caps and exclusive previews in the likes of EGM appease the core audience and make the game seem quite attractive to non-expert players.

I recently read that the game was not being developed internally at Capcom as I'd been lead to believe and that it had been farmed out to Dimps, the shovelware and anime game company made up of ex-SNK employees who've brought us such memorable titles as Inuyasha: A feudal Fairy Tale, Digimon Battle Spirit 2 and the failed Atomiswave/PS2 vs. Fighter The Rumble Fish.

Great.

While I will reserve judgment until I've had some hands-on time I must admit that I am no longer anticipating Street Fighter IV. The game still has potential to be great, but I am curious as to why Capcom would farm out such an important nostalgic title to Dimps. Maybe it doesn't make financial sense to put your good staff on a niche genre title like Street Fighter.

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A glimmer of hope.

by K1

Posted on Friday, May 2, 2008
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Earthbound for the wii given a rating by the ESRB

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