David Hellman, the talented artist many of you know from his recent work on Braid, was in town recently for the Penny Arcade Expo. Since neither he nor I had ever been on the Seattle Underground Tour, we decided to make a day of it.
While waiting for the tour to begin, we began talking about some game design particulars, specifically with regards to The Legend of Zelda and Shadow of the Colossus. We were both in immediate agreement that the Zelda series had gotten consistently worse with each iteration, and furthermore we agreed on the reason: it continued to become more of a forced sequence of events, and less of an exciting exploration of a magical place (David also recently wrote about this problem in the latest DS incarnation). We continued to discuss the finer points of this until the tour began.
Almost as if it had been scripted, the tour managed to serve as a near perfect example of everything we had just said. The overbearing tour guide, who was fanatic in her refusal to let anyone say anything or ask any questions during the tour (lest it derail her carefully practiced banter), forced us through the series of underground passageways stopping exclusively at "sequence points" along the way, where she gave a rehearsed speech. All around us were interesting items - abandon machinery, passageways that led off into unknown places, old electrical wiring, etc. But none of these things were accessible, and even when David and I asked about one or two of them, the tour guide actively dismissed our questions because apparently they were not part of the tour.
It was incredibly frustrating. Which coincidentally, is exactly how we feel when we try to play modern Zelda games.
So until Zelda games return to their explorational roots, or the Underground Tour gets some guides who actually care about their visitors' curiosity, we will have to make due with the limited experiences that we are given. Included below are a series of shots from David's iPhone, which capture some of the things about which we would have liked to learn, but were never given the opportunity.
Jon linked to and expanded on our advertising-in-games rant on his excellent blog over at braid-game.com. There's some good discussion going on over there in the comments, as well as the clip of David Lynch alluded to by Jeff in the podcast. Check it out!
My good friend Jonathan Blow's new game, Braid, is now available on XBox Live Arcade!
Hopefully, you have already heard of this game, because it has been getting rave reviews from press around the world. But just in case you haven't, now you have. If you have an XBox 360, you owe it to yourself to log on right now and buy Braid. I guarantee it will be a unique and memorable gaming experience, which is something I can only say about a precious few games.
Highly, highly recommended.
For IGJ4, I started out making a game like Gears of War, but where your only control was your own mouth. Half way in, I had another idea, which was to make a game where you play an ESRB censor who tries to remove all the swears from an M-rated game. I combined the two ideas for the final game, Ears of War, in which the mission briefings are the ESRB gameplay and the actual combat is mouth-based Gears. Unfortunately, the audio recognition is really shitty, so it takes a good deal of tweaking with the microphone to get it so that you can play.
For IGJ2, I was supposed to just do support for other folks, but I got the gaming bug 2 days into it and decided to try to bang a game out in the remaining two days. The result is a fucked up game where you try to light hamsters on fire to help get them to the level exit... and somehow it's just really fun. Even sweet, unassuming folks seem to love igniting little furry creatures. Which is kind of sick. But what can you do?
For IGJ1, my game allowed the player to soar around like a bird using their arms as wings. It was really cool to play - I love it. You could do tricks like in Tony Hawk, things like catching jumping fish or completing the slalom course. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge there was never permission to release binaries of the engine (or something similar), so I do not have a redistributable. Just movies.
Yes, at one point in my life I drove up to Canada with two friends and $10,000 Canadian in cash. We picked up a U-Haul, bought two DDRMAX2 machines from an arcade there, loaded them into the back, and drove them back through customs. Right after September 11th. And we didn't even get stopped. So much for national security.
I did a complete disassembly of my machine, cleaned it, and took lots of photos. For those of you who want to know how to disassemble and clean it yourself, these may be useful to you, so here they are.
