Warp Skip!

Press X to JSON

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:05:57 -0400

Things have been pretty quiet here at Warp Skip! lately, but it’s not for lack of trying; we’ve been busy in the lab cooking up the next generation of video games.

On this night before the launch of E3 2010, we’d like to introduce our first tool: the Press X to JSON API. This will please you with a depth that might surprise you.

The Press X to JSON API

All you have to do is send an HTTP POST request to http://api.heavyrainjoke.com.

Required Parameters

button: Must be “X”.

I Don’t Know What You’re Talking About

For the curl-challenged among us, a live demo which will still make no sense to you is available on hurl.it. More features may be added as we dare each other into wasting time on them, so stay tuned to the eventual home of all Press X To JSON API news, heavyrainjoke.com.

Team

Lead engineer on this project was Casey Kolderup, unfortunately enough. Special thanks to Adam Parrish and Rob Dubbin for nailing down the tricky details and agreeing on a standard for the API. If you want to get involved, you can send pull requests on github.

End the game saying "Grue win"

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:00:00 -0400

The voting deadline approaches for TWIFcomp, “a competition for tweet-sized interactive fiction.” You can view all of the entries here, and most of them can be played online. It’s amazing what the entrants have managed to do inside the constraints of the competition. I’m especially a big fan of the entries that work both as clever games and as expressive source code (utilizing Inform 7 to its fullest). A few of my favorites:

Tumbleweed Hero by Warp Skip colleague Rob Dubbin is among the most laconic entries in the competition, but also among the funniest:

"Tumbleweed Hero" by Rob Dubbin

Desert is room.  Description is "The desert is arid.";

Instead of going nowhere:
	say "You roll [noun].";

FGBG (quoted in this entry’s title) does a great job of encapsulating the total grue experience, and is very satisfying to play:

cave is room

a man fumbling is edible in cave

instead doing something other than eating, looking: say "Shh.  Eat."

before eating anything: end the game saying "Grue win"

You See Chaos Here. by Andrew Plotkin wins my vote for technical proficiency and general mindbendingness (especially if you know a little bit about how the Z-Machine works):

"You See Chaos Here." by Zarf

Madness is room

Chaos is in it

Before doing anything: x

To x:
    (- action = ActionData-->(1+11*random(64)); if (~~noun) noun = player; -)

Finally, Adam Thornton’s Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis deserves an award. It somehow manages to adhere to the letter of the rules while extravagantly skirting the spirit. I won’t reproduce the source code here, since it’s around five hundred megabytes, but it’s worth downloading and trying out. (If you’re wondering why the game wasn’t disqualified for its size, read the rules closely.)

—Adam

Retronauts: A Tengen Family Reunion

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:12:06 -0400

Retronauts: A Tengen Family Reunion:

On the most recent episode of the excellent classic gaming podcast Retronauts, Frank Cifaldi hosted a round table of 3 programmers who worked at Atari during the Tengen days. There’s some interesting stuff in this, and you get a real sense for how things were making games in the 80s, when you could have the license to “port” a game to a new platform but not have any source code or oversight from the original IP holder.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tengen, you can read more on Wikipedia. If you grew up on the NES you may remember their strangely shaped black cartridges, but it’s possible you didn’t realize what was going on there. At one point, one of the developers tries to draw a parallel between Tengen and people who jailbreak their iPhone— while I do think that the strict licensing methods of Nintendo during the 80s is a good comparison to Apple’s App Store, I’m not sure I’m willing to go that far.

—Casey

Shaun Inman's Notes on New Super Mario Bros

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:40:35 -0400

Shaun Inman's Notes on New Super Mario Bros:

Shaun Inman is working on a game for the iPhone/iPad called Mimeoverse: Mimeo and the Kleptopus King. As an avid iPhone (and future iPad) user, I’m generally skeptical of sidescrolling games on the platform (and games that make use of virtual “buttons” in general), but this game actually looks quite promising.

In order to start thinking about level design for his own game, Inman played through all of the DS game New Super Mario Bros and took notes on almost every level in the game. There’s a lot of interesting thought here, although I do hope he gets his Wii back soon and manages to play through New Super Mario Bros Wii with the same critical eye, since NSMB DS was an ultimately shallow and disappointing game.

—Casey

“Confusion” by Michael Nyman While Enemy Zero has...

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:13:29 -0400

“Confusion” by Michael Nyman

While Enemy Zero has its flaws, it does have an amazing soundtrack by minimalist composer Michael Nyman. As I learned the hard way last week, however, it’d be better to just acquire the soundtrack and listen to it than play through this mess of a Saturn game waiting for short samples of digitized orchestral brilliance— too often a track from the soundtrack fades in during a tense cutscene only to stop almost immediately (and abruptly) seconds later when gameplay resumes.

I should mention that a big part of what got me on this Kenji Eno kick is that Ray Barnholt included this track in an episode of his awesome new video game music podcast “Sound Test” a few weeks ago and the following day when I was in a local used video game store I saw a copy of Enemy Zero, a game I hadn’t seen in stores in the past year or two that I’ve been paying attention to Sega Saturn games now that more and more of them are getting rare, which seemed like too much of a coincidence not to purchase. It doesn’t look like this game is particularly hard to find, at least if eBay prices are any indication, and that might have something to do with its awkward mechanics and lack of clear communication about the game’s plot and objectives, but there is something oddly charming about the game and it seems that it may be interesting to fans of Data East’s Silent Debuggers for the TurboGrafx-16 (which is on Virtual Console) in that it brings some similar mechanics into 3D.

—Casey

"DIGITAL SADNESS" MULTIMEDIA

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Below is what scrolls by when you start up “Disc 0” of the 4-disc Sega Saturn game “Enemy Zero” by insane man Kenji Eno. Of course, then it turns out that Disc 0 is just a trailer for the game, a promotional video for Eno’s studio WARP, Inc (in which Eno comes off like John Romero, which is hilarious), and a Metal Gear Solid VR Missions-style training stage that implies that you’ll actually have a gun for more than, say, a tenth of the real game and that it won’t have limited amounts of ammo.

But I digress. The menu screen for the game-free portion of Enemy Zero:

ENEMY ZERO
WILL
BECOME
A MORE
MOVIE-ORIENTED
TITLE,
WITH
LAURA
AS AN ACTRESS.
THE MAIN
STAGE
OF
THE WORK
WILL
BE
THE SPACE
ITSELF.
BUT
ENEMY ZERO
WILL
HAVE
AN ASPECT
OF
AMUSEMENT
AS
A GAME
AS
WELL,
A LESS
WEIGHT.
ONE
OF
THE CONCEPTUAL
SUBJECTS
OF
THE WORK
WILL
BE
“DIGITAL SADNESS”
MULTIMEDIA,
AS
DIGITAL
MEDIA,
HAS
EPHEMERAL
FACTORS
AND
RISKS.
THROUGH
SHOWING
ENEMY ZERO,
I
WOULD
LIKE
TO
MAKE
IT
CLEAR
THAT
THERE
ARE
SUCH
CONTINGENCY
RISKS
IN
THE DIGITAL
WORLD
OF
THE MODERN
TIMES

Me too, Kenji. Me too.

—Casey

Cognition, randomness, and deception

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:30:31 -0400

Frank Lantz, responding in the comment thread of a blog post he made today:

I would like to encourage game designers to stop thinking of players as subjects of psychological experiments and think of them as collaborators, fellow researchers in the experiments games allow us to do on ourselves.

The original post concerns talks by Sid Meier and Rob Pardo at the most recent GDC concerning randomness and player psychology. (Here’s a good summary of both talks.) Lantz concludes that there’s a danger in adjusting models of randomness in games to be more in line with human intuition, and asks: “Shouldn’t games be an opportunity for players to wrap their heads around counter-intuitive truths? Shouldn’t games make us smarter about how randomness works instead of reinforcing our fallacious beliefs?”

Long time Warp Skip colleague Ben Zeigler wrote today on a similar topic, detailing all of the instances at GDC where game designers were urged to deceive and prevaricate. Ben’s more sanguine about deception in game design than Lantz, comparing the whole deal to professional wrestling:

The vast majority of [professional wrestling] fans are completely aware that it’s all fake and planned, but they don’t care. They are completely willing to suspend their disbelief, and in return become part of the show. The experiences are real even though they’re based on a foundation of deception, and that’s at the core of gaming as well.

Both articles are good reads. Go read them. Lots to think about.

—Adam

Press The Buttons: Exploring The Capcom Turnaround

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:57:00 -0400

Press The Buttons: Exploring The Capcom Turnaround:

Matthew Green:

If you pay close enough attention while playing Capcom’s 2D action platformer sidescrollers, eventually you’ll begin to notice a pattern emerge when it comes to level design. Eventually the protagonist will come to a point on his journey where the path will force him to drop into a room from above, make a quick jog to the right, drop down to the ground, and continue onwards to the right.

He then goes on to show pretty much every example of when this has happened in Capcom’s history. Very nicely done. (via Joel Hunt)

Everyone Loves a Period Piece 2

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:51:28 -0500

Stealth games are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and with good reason: they can inject buckets of tension into their gameplay. Part of the tension is intended, but unfortunately a lot of the times part of it comes from the fact that, perhaps unintentionally, getting caught can just be no fun at all. I finished Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2 (AC2) the other day, and came away really impressed with how it addresses this, among other things. Now in case you were wondering about the relevance of reviewing a game that came out three months ago, you’re actually a bit off: I never played through AC1, so this is largely a review of a game that came out more than two years ago.

Above: you can actually do crap like this.

In the interest of keeping this post focused on AC2’s gameplay, I’ll simply mention that the plot requires you to run around Renaissance Italy, assassinating various members of a conspiracy, usually by inserting a knife into their back. You spend most of the game sneaking from mission to mission in three or four towns. This isn’t too straightforward, as you’ll have to move amongst a fairly active patrol of guards. However, this turns out to be a lot of fun, as (1) you’re secretly the love-child of a grade 5.10 rock climber and a Cirque de soleil acrobat and (2) the towns are designed to take advantage of (1). Town design was clearly a labor of love for Ubisoft: although you only get about four fully fleshed out towns over the course of the game, they all demonstrate an incredible level of scale and detail, and the game always gives you plenty of ways to get from point A to point B. You really come to appreciate this in the missions where you’re asked to tail someone. The complexity of the streets gives you tons of ways to stay with your mark, whether its sneaking through crowds, swinging on outcroppings, or going across the rooftops, which make these sections some of the best parts of the game.

If guards are directly monitoring something of interest to you, the game usually presents three potential solutions, which are, in decreasing degree of hassle:

Wage a full-on street fight. This won’t be much fun for you, as one thing that AC2 unfortunately inherits from its Ubisoft Prince of Persia is PoP’s awkward combat system.
Hire a roving band of thieves/prostitutes/mercenaries to annoy/seduce/brutally fight the guards in your way.
Use a clever feature of the local geography, and maybe one or two well-placed stealth kills, to get through things painlessly and cost-free.

It’s interesting to compare the guards in AC2 with the ones from the other stealth series that I know best, Metal Gear Solid. You can view MGS as setting up a very clear but unforgiving contract with the player: the game gives you a method for precisely determining what guards can sense at any time, and the levels are designed so that it’s entirely feasible to get through them without being seen at all. The consequence is that you pretty much have to stay completely out of sight the whole time. Sure, if someone sees you, you may be able to fight your way out, but you’ll probably take a lot of damage. You might be able to run away and hide again, but even in the best case, you have to sit in your hidey-hole and do nothing for minutes on end, which isn’t a lot of fun. The game is really designed for you to rehash each section until you get through undetected, and sure enough, whenever I play and get caught, I’ll just pop the suicide pill and start over.

Above: a typical escape scene breaks out.

In comparison, AC2 is faster and looser. The game doesn’t give you precise information about the guards’ spheres of perception, and the levels are designed so that you’ll certainly be noticed from time to time. The trick is that getting noticed can actually be a lot of fun. First, even though you’re almost perpetually piquing the interest of some guard, this only starts a timer for how long you have to make them lose interest, whether by blending in with the crowd or ducking behind some scenery. Second, there will be times when you put the town on full alert, either because you flubbed up, or because the game forces you into this situation after you take out a high-profile target. These scenarios can turn out to be some of the most fun moments in the game, as they put a fresh twist on all of your tricks listed above for sneaking around guards in the first place. For example, after finishing one assassination, I swung and climbed around town for about a solid minute looking for a way to shake the crowd of guards after me. I eventually spotted out of the corner of my eye some mercenaries, which I hired on the fly to fight off the guards as I made my escape. This all feels pretty emergent, which makes it that much more gratifying.

This is the world that you work through to get to your mission sites. When you actually get to the sites, you typically find some way slip past the guard, which places you on the rooftop, in position to scout your target’s moving patterns, eavesdrop on his conversation a bit, and find the best way to swoop in for the kill. Getting to stalk the guy from the roof is a great moment, but frankly it often turns out to be a bit anti-climactic, as usually all you have to do to finish him is find a spot to drop from that doesn’t cause too much fall damage, then run up and stab the dude. I think it’s an area that could benefit from a bit more complexity. What I’d love to see in AC3 is a game mechanic that gives you the power to organize and schedule events, using multiple characters or traps, and then force you to get these to play out exactly in concert in order to pull off the job. But this is mostly just brainstorming by someone who really got into the game. In general, AC2 does a great job of coming off as emergent but fluid at the same time, and the result is a very satisfying game.

—Bill

Another Castle podcast

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:00:00 -0500

Hear me talk about Mass Effect, Animal Crossing, interactive fiction and Wittgenstein in the latest episode of Another Castle. It’s always a blast to sit down and have a conversation about games with Charles J. Pratt (illustrious game designer and host of Another Castle), and I hope it’s fun to listen to as well.

I have an unshakably high opinion of myself, so it’s a big deal for me to say that I am by far the least interesting person ever to appear on Another Castle. Charles has been reeling in all the heavyweights of the New York City game design scene; the interviews with Frank Lantz and Jesper Juul in particular are can’t-miss. In my view, it’s the best podcast on game design out there. Download all the episodes here, and make sure to subscribe.

—Adam

Of secret sauces

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:10:51 -0500

Dennis Crowley, Foursquare founder, in a recent interview with O’Reilly Radar:

The game mechanics [in Foursquare] are the secret sauce. They keep people engaged long enough to see the interesting things that happen when they participate frequently. It’s kind of like with Twitter. If you drop someone in Twitter and don’t give them a reason to participate, they get bored of it really quickly. But, if you spend 10 days with Twitter, you fall in love with it. Foursquare is similar. Spend an afternoon with it, you’ll say: “This is awful. I get nothing out of it.” But as you start to get friends on it and as you check-in at different places, you realize complexities emerge. You see how people are using it and the content they’ve added. The game mechanics hold peoples’ hands through the first 10 to 20 days of the service.

I’m posting this as a follow-up to my post last week about achievements and Foursquare. It’s interesting to compare Foursquare’s “game mechanics” with achievements/trophies. Maybe one of the purposes of achievements is to “hold peoples’ hands” through the first 10 to 20 minutes of playing a video game?

—Adam

Cry Havok

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:09:51 -0500

“Cry Havok” is a fun game you can play if you have friends, roommates, etc. who play video games while you are in the room or who are often around when you are playing games. The only prerequisite is having played enough games to recognize the presence of the Havok Physics Engine, the most frequently licensed physics middleware in modern video gaming.

If you haven’t trained yourself to recognize Havok already, think back to interactions with movable objects in Halo 3, Bioshock, Half-Life 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, or Dead Space. It’s hard to describe, but there’s a particular feeling that games running Havok have that is inescapable. It’s also spectacularly popular, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find a game whose physics modeling will instantly explain to you what I’m talking about.

Anyway, once you can easily identify Havok at work, “Cry Havok” is just a race to see, when starting a new game that has licensed this wonderful piece of software, who can first identify a blatantly obvious event where Havok’s exact gravitational model and frictional coefficients caused something hilarious and/or awesome to happen. At that point, you have to declare your victory— “We’ve got Havok!” is my personal favorite— at which point anyone else present can contest whether or not you’ve “spotted the middleware.” If you win, you get a point (which means absolutely nothing).

For bonus fun, feel free to build a big red button that can sit on your coffee table that will set off some sort of klaxon above your TV set. Whoever gets the point for a new game gets to press the button, which will hopefully make metal walls descend over all windows and doors in your apartment while your homemade alarm rings and rings. Maybe you can make it let some dogs loose or something. It’s a literary reference, and you only live once, you know?

—Casey

All Wark AND All Play

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:08:19 -0500

I recently finished the main quest of Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon, coincidentally right around the time that Shiren the Wanderer for Wii was coming out and Jeremy Parish started talking about roguelikes a lot. This got me into sort of a roguelike kick, so you may be seeing a few posts from me on the subject over the next week or so.

First I want to talk about about Chocobo’s Dungeon, since it was what initially renewed my interest in the genre after years of playing NetHack for five or six levels, not knowing what to do, dying, then not playing again for several months. Chocobo’s Dungeon is lightweight enough to cause purists to scoff in its general direction, but I think it’s a pretty great way of introducing someone who’s used to traditional JRPGs to the dark side. Beyond that, it’s just a fun, surprisingly polished game, and one of the overlooked gems on the Wii, if you ask me.

The story, such as it is (really more of a premise), involves a chocobo named Chocobo arriving in a mysterious isolated town where everyone has lost their memories, and it’s up to Chocobo to restore them by venturing into dungeons, collecting loot, and fighting monsters. Oh, and there’s some kind of weird angel baby involved. That’s all I can remember without looking up the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, but it really doesn’t matter beyond providing you with a hub world from which you can reach the various dungeons, in addition to buying and managing equipment (more on this later).

In case you’re not familiar with roguelikes, this is basically how it works: once you enter a dungeon, all movement and actions are entirely turn-based and grid-based. The map of every floor is randomly generated and includes some combination of monsters, traps, and loot, and the challenge is not only to survive and make it to the exit, but to balance that with exploring the map thoroughly enough to prepare you for the next one by collecting equipment, food, and experience. After enough floors, you reach the end of the dungeon (maybe after fighting a large monster) and escape with your spoils.

Chocobo’s Dungeon makes things a bit easier than some similar games by having fairly lenient penalties for death. If you die, you lose the items and money you were carrying, but keep the experience and the gear you had equipped at the time (there are also places outside the dungeon where you can store any possessions you want to keep safe). Most dungeons have checkpoints every ten floors that you can warp to upon re-entering, and at every floor’s exit you’re given the opportunity to escape back to the hub world (keeping and identifying everything you’ve collected). You can also revisit previous dungeons to collect more items. So while the occasional death is inevitable, with smart playing it shouldn’t set you back far enough to be too frustrating.

The parts of the game I found most interesting were the job system and equipment upgrades. At the beginning of the game, you’re just a regular, “Natural” chocobo, but as you progress, you’ll unlock additional jobs, each with its own abilities, that you can switch between at will whenever you enter a dungeon (and occasionally at checkpoints within one). In addition to Chocobo’s overall experience-based level, each job can be leveled up independently by collecting job points from slain monsters, granting it additional abilities. The jobs make up a spectrum of specialties from combat to stealth to magic to item collection, and they all feel pretty useful while encouraging you to vary your strategies.

As for the equipment, every saddle and set of talons (the chocobo’s version of armor and weapons, respectively) that you collect may have special attributes such as immunity to certain status effects, bonuses against certain types of monsters, hunger prevention, faster HP regeneration, etc. The interesting part is that these attributes are represented as “seals,” and each piece of equipment also usually has several empty slots for additional seals. If you bring the equipment to the blacksmith in town, you can have her transfer seals from one piece of equipment to another to create combinations of effects that can eventually end up bordering on ridiculously powerful. This adds a lot of depth and provides incentive to collect and hoard even equipment with crappy stats if you think its seal might come in handy on another item later.

Unfortunately, the lack of permanent death leads, seeming inescapably, to grinding. Since you always keep your experience, there’s nothing stopping you from just going into a dungeon, fighting monsters until you die, and repeating (though it’s always in your best interest to get out of a dungeon alive so you can keep the loot you’ve collected). This is a fundamentally un-roguelike idea — though of course, it’s extremely Final Fantasy. It’s mitigated somewhat by the job system, which adds some variety, and of course you don’t have to grind any more than you want to… but a lot of the motivation to develop good tactics is lost when you know that if you just put in enough time, you can eventually brute force your way through the enemies. But this may be a necessary evil for not completely turning off this game’s target audience, and if you do want more of a challenge, there are quite a few optional “special rules” dungeons in which your level is capped and there may be restrictions on which items can be used/generated, etc. (There’s even one where you have to survive with only one hit point.)

For me, this game proved to be a great “gateway drug.” The similar games I’ve been playing since have made it seem a little on the simple and easy side, but it still has its own unique charms, and I think it does a better job of distilling roguelike mechanics while remaining accessible than the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games. If you’re looking for a good RPG on the Wii (and are more interested in mechanics than story), I recommend giving this a try. If you like it, perhaps you’ll be interested in going on to the game I’ll be talking about next time: Shiren the Wanderer. Stay tuned!

—Scott

Trajectile: Aiming

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:06:05 -0500

Trajectile is a new DSiWare game developed by Q-Games and published by Nintendo that every Warp Skip! writer who owns a DSi has been raving over for the past week or two. It presents an interesting puzzle game that reminds me a little of Breakout mixed with Bust-a-Move. Its aiming mechanic requires the use of the stylus to pick an angle at which to aim your shot, which comes from the bottom screen and shoots up towards the square bricks on the top screen. What I find particularly interesting about this mechanic is that because the exact angle at which you make your shot can make a very big difference, the trail that shows the beginning of the path your missile will take is drawn with a series of faded grey dots while you’re dragging your stylus left and right. It’s only after you pause in one spot on the screen for a half second or so that the dots turn blue, indicating that you are free to lift the stylus and fire a missile. It looks like this:

Left: not ready to fire yet. Right: ready to fire.

The reason for this becomes clear if you’re using the stylus and aren’t being careful— it’s fairly easy to not lift your stylus directly off of the screen, causing a “adjust the aim” signal to be sent to the game. If you skid off of the screen before lifting, the angle could change slightly before your missile fires, ruining that shot and wrecking your chances of completing the level in the allotted number of turns! By requiring your shot to be lined up before firing, this aiming mechanic avoids almost any chance of that happening.

It can be annoying that you have to wait for this “lock-on” to happen at times, but after playing through the bronze and silver puzzles, I’ve decided it’s worth the hassle. I’d rather not fire when I meant to than vice-versa, and I appreciate Q-Games paying this attention to detail. That said, I also wouldn’t mind a D-pad + A button control scheme for this game since playing on the train in the morning can lead to more canceled shots than successful ones.

—Casey

Low-fi Lowdown

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:07:52 -0500

Platformers with blocky, pixelated graphics have been on a big comeback recently, especially in the form of downloadable indie titles. We’ll leave an analysis of how the low pixel count makes it easier for individual developers to draw each frame of animation themselves and simplifies collision detection to the Gamasutra member blogs, though, and instead just link those of you who want to play some games to the (free) goods(!).

I will warn you that along with this resurgence of old-school graphics comes old-school difficulty. A couple of these games had their share of serious controller-throwing moments. Luckily my keyboard isn’t wireless, so I was safe. So, the games:

MoneySeize (Flash or Windows download)

My favorite part of MoneySeize is that it makes it cool to be a fat rich guy in a suit and top hat again. Since I’m halfway there, I figure by the time I find my suit and top hat this will be what everyone in Brooklyn will be aspiring to and I’ll have a head start on the latest trend. Anyway, as a FRGiaSaTH, you of course have to gather up all the money so that you can build a fabulous tower on the main map. Along the way, you have to do some serious platforming just to get the bare minimum of coins in a given level.

The game isn’t perfect— the pixel art aesthetic is occasionally ruined by some weirdly smooth animations or particle effects, and there is some weird anti-aliasing that Flash is doing that makes the graphics look a little fuzzy sometimes. However, it’s fun to see just how many coins you can collect on each stage, and there is one thing more rewarding than filling your coffers: the feeling you get just from mastering chaining together the double jump, the wall jump, and the skid jump in various combinations. When you manage to pull off an impressive feat and get a single coin that was out of your way, you will feel extremely proud. Go out and swat an orphan with your cane, FRGiaSaTH, you’ve earned it.

Star Guard (Windows/Mac)

A fun distraction with an appealing aesthetic that gave me flashbacks of playing Apple IIe games at my friend’s house as a kid. Anna Anthropy wrote a thoughtful, well-illustrated breakdown of the game from a design perspective that highlights the cleverness of the stages, but I found the fight against the boss frustrating because it broke the Bioshock-like mechanic of the game that kept the world persistent across multiple lives and as such required a total shift in play style. Still, it’s definitely worth spending some time on, as it reminded me of other games from 2009 like Jumpman and AsciiPortal that add some new gameplay ideas to very classic, stripped-down engines. Jumpman and Star Guard in particular do a great job of letting you enjoy the mechanics without being burdened by B- narrative and load times.

Broken Cave Robot (Windows only)

Broken Cave Robot requires multiple playthroughs. It has a manual mapping system and a cavernous expanse filled with steep drop-offs, crazy power-ups, and a lot of dark labyrinthine segments. It also has a weirdly charming protagonist and a very “Metroid” feel in its exploration and power-up structure. The constant pressure of a time limit proved to be too much for me to handle right now, but the time I did spend with this game was enjoyable. If you like games that are punishingly hard but expect you to take what you’ve learned from each playthrough and apply them to the next, you may like this one.

You Can’t Possibly Expect Me To Do That (Windows only)

The name says it all— You Can’t Possibly Expect Me To Do That does, in fact, expect you to do that. You have to continuously commit suicide, aiming the trajectory of your corpse in such a way that it will collide with a block that will revive you, often on the other side of some wall or otherwise impassable obstacle. This game is kind of crazy. Are you crazy? You might like this crazy game.

Tower of Heaven (Windows only)

I enjoyed Tower of Heaven most out of all of the games listed here. It’s really simple, and not particularly long, but the way it imposes “laws” that complicate your passage through initially simple levels is really neat and I liked the Game Boy aesthetic that the game featured. If you don’t play any other game on this list, please at least play this one.

—Casey

It's dangerous to go alone take Church-Rosser Theorem

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:06:52 -0500

I was at work the other night, getting my feet wet for the first time with a tool that’s known an automated proof assistant. Now there’s no need to go into all of the details of an automated proof assistant (or of Coq, the specific tool I was using. Incidentally, none of this is really specific to Coq. I just wanted a reason to include a picture of a French rooster in a white suit) to get something out of this post, which should after all, be talking about video games at some point, but the basic idea is something like this. A mathematical theorem isn’t taken for true in mathematics until it has a complete, fully-hashed out proof that should be a beautiful model of objective perfection. But that’s kind of BS, because in reality, a proof boils down to an argument (albeit a very careful one) that convinces enough mathematicians, and for which the other ones can’t find a flaw.

Coq makes the ideal of objective perfection in proofs a reality. If you have some theorem in mind, then you write it up in the language of Coq, and then you do the same for the theorem’s proof. The key feature of Coq is that never lets you off the hook when you’re writing your proof. Each step has to follow the established rules, or it doesn’t let you take the next step. This is why Coq is sometimes viewed as “needlessly formal and pedantic,” and keep in mind this is coming from a group of people that see articles with titles like Round-Efficient Broadcast Authentication Protocols for Fixed Topology Classes and lick their lips with excitement. So it was at least a little surprising to me that as I was sitting there hacking away with this thing, and I was actually having fun in the process. And not just “fun” in the sense of “pretty fun as far as educational software goes”: I realized that something about this felt like gaming back in the 8-bit days: a little like Zelda or Ninja Gaiden for some reason. This got me thinking on just what I loved about those old games, or good games from any time, that could possibly overlap with something like a proof assistant. I think it boils down to the following.

First, I have a hunch that people (and this includes kids playing old NES platformers) can really enjoy doing something that’s demanding and rigorous, as long as they don’t feel like they’re being cheated. Ask someone what math course they hated the most in high school, and a large amount of the time it seems like the answer is “geometry.” For a mathematician, that’s a pretty depressing answer to hear, because high school geometry is supposed to be everyone’s first introduction to the notion of formal proof. But is it really? Sometimes for me it felt like a few steps of a proof intuitively “worked” for the teacher but other steps, indistinguishable to me from the good ones, were no good, and I could never get a clear answer why. But consider that kids a lot younger than high-schoolers do something that arguably takes a lot more dedication than geometry whenever they play through Ninja Gaiden, yet they do it willingly. In their own free time. Why? Personally, part of the reason I slogged through that cruel, cruel game was because even though so many of the victories were so hard-won, you knew that when you beat friggin Stage 6-4, then that win was really yours, not caused by the whim of the game spontaneously not liking the way you plaed or deciding to finally go easy on you. I think a lot of the satisfaction of working with Coq stems from the same thing. Coq doesn’t give you any breaks, so getting practically anything done is a huge pain. But when you finally prove the theorem that you set out to prove, it makes your sense of satisfaction that much more complete.

Second, working with Coq gives you satisfaction in incremental pieces. You have an overall goal (to prove your theorem), but to get there, Coq forces you to break your goal down into subgoals, and further subgoals until you can handle your task one chunk. Each time you prove a subgoal (or lemma), the background color of your environment resolves to a pleasing shade of blue, and the system prints a gratifying “Subgoal proved. Lemma definition added.” It’s a very “Shine Get” moment. Now that you’ve put in the work to prove the lemma, its yours to use as a tool as you see fit for the remainder of your task. So maybe Zelda or Megaman are better analogies than Mario.

Above: a typical Coq session, mid-proof. In the top frame, text in blue has been checked by Coq. In the bottom, text below the “====” gives your current subgoal, and text above the “====” gives the hypotheses you have available to you to prove the subgoal.

Above: proof completed: the day is won… for now.

Finally, Coq introduces complexity by asking you to master only a few basic rules, and then letting you build (and hopefully, eventually solve) bigger and bigger problems from those rules. A lot of good games do something similar: consider the first half of Portal or pretty much all of Splosion Man. Those games only obligate you to figure out how a handful of basic mechanics work, but then they’re are able to crank out level after excellent level by gluing those mechanics together, each time in more and more complex and ingenious ways.

Of course, I’m not about to go out on a limb and say that Coq will be the next big game development platform. For one, their character design has a long way to go (although you have to admit, the ”Proof General” here wouldn’t have looked all that out of place if he’d come on the scene sometime in the mid-90’s):

—Bill

Pantene Paragon

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:00:00 -0500

I can’t be the first person to notice this. The “Paragon” icon from Mass Effect looks suspiciously similar to the Pantene logo:

Maybe this is subtle symbolism. The concept of hair here is clearly being equated with the concept of virtue. It’s telling that in the Mass Effect universe, humans seem to be the only sentient race with hair of any kind:

Turians, asaris, drell, krogans—all of them! Hairless as baby infants. Who knows, though. Maybe quarians and the volus are super furry under those suits of theirs.

—Adam

About Warp Skip!

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:35:00 -0500

About Warp Skip!:

In case you were wondering who we are, there is now an “About” page accessible via the sidebar of the blog. Not that it contains any actual useful information. But hey, faux Game Boy Camera pictures! Retro-chic!

Achievements, Foursquare, and Donald Norman

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:21:40 -0500

In a recent article at Gamasutra, Ian Bogost declares his distaste for Foursquare. In the article he groups Foursquare badges and mayorships with Xbox Live gamerscore and achievements, saying that both are essentially customer loyalty programs—along the lines of frequent flyer miles. The main argument in the article is that Foursquare, in particular, is a lousy customer loyalty program, as it rewards loyalty to Foursquare, not to the venues that Foursquare users check into.

I have some beef with this argument.

I do agree that Foursquare and XBL gamerscore/achievements share a number of similarities. But I don’t think that they’re customer loyalty programs. Maybe they do function in that capacity, but their real benefit to users is more basic. Foursquare, gamerscore, achievements—these are all engines to lend feedback to activities (like going out, or playing video games) that don’t have feedback built in. They make playing video games and going out with friends more usable.

[pictured above: Don Norman’s gamer card. Note: not actually Don Norman’s gamer card.]

I’m talking about “feedback” here in the Donald Norman, Design of Everyday Things sense. Feedback is the information that a system gives you about its internal state. Good feedback is a vital part of any usable system.

Normally, your social life and your video game habits don’t have quantifiable feedback. Until I started using Foursquare, for example, I had only my memory to count on when it came to figuring out how often I went out—or, when I did go out, where I went to. Foursquare’s popularity, I think, lies in making this information visible: it helps you keep track of where you’ve been, and compare your activities to those of your friends. It gives you useful feedback on your social activity.

Foursquare provides a number of mechanisms for displaying and quantifying this feedback. Friend notifications are one, mayorship is another. Foursquare mayorships aren’t really about loyalty! They’re just a means of quantifying the way you interact with a place. It’s not about rewarding repeat customers—it’s about letting you know whether or not you’re a repeat customer.

Gamerscore and achievements serve a similar purpose. They give you feedback on your play; they give you acknowledgment when you do something noteworthy; they let you know (in broad terms) how much of a game’s content you’ve completed; they let you compare the way you’re playing the game to the way your friends are playing it. Achievements are one of the reasons I prefer playing games on the 360 to playing games on (for example) the Wii: more feedback, more context, makes for a more fun gaming experience.

With a few notable exceptions, no one plays games just for the achievements. They’re not a goal in and of themselves. Likewise, no one “plays” Foursquare just to get the badges. Both badges and achievements are there to let you know that your activities follow a particular pattern. As an added benefit, badges and achievements you haven’t earned yet suggest what other patterns are possible.

Foursquare, achievements, trophies, whatever—there’s a reason that these systems are popular, and they’re not going away any time soon. I’m interested to see more game designs that exploit or subvert these systems. Achievement unlocked is a great place to start. (Could a similar game be made with Foursquare?)

—Adam

Shut Up And Play This Game: "Record Tripping"

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:30:00 -0500

“Shut Up And Play This Game” is a recurring feature here at Warp Skip! The deal: you read the blog post, then you play the game that we link you to. No questions asked. See the first “Shut Up” post for a full description, or view all of the “Shut Up and Play This Game” games!

If you asked me how you could create a video game that was relevant to my interests, I’d say “aww shucks, I already play video games! Just keep on making great games, folks!” But if you kept insisting, and forced me to make a list of things I like that should be in a video game, I think it’d look something like this:

The music of Gorillaz and Spoon
Rhythm and puzzle gameplay elements
References to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books (I can’t help it; it’s a programmer thing)
Pretending to know things about turntablism
Bill Murray

“Record Tripping”, a game by the Bell Brothers, combines the first four of these elements (and until all five are incorporated in something, a boy can dream) into a short, fun Flash game that makes use of the mouse wheel in a way I’ve never seen before. It starts off very easy, but by the end its challenges made me think a bit about how to complete them. It’s nice that while you’re graded on how well you do each stage, failing to complete the challenge doesn’t block you from seeing the rest of the stages. The whole time you’re working over loops made out of music by artists like Gorillaz, Spoon, and Death Cab For Cutie. Forget about the disappointment that was DJ Hero and play this game for a few minutes— it’s free, and you might as well get some precious Flash gaming in now before HTML5 kills it forever.

SHUT UP AND PLAY “RECORD TRIPPING”

—Casey