All posts by Andrew Armstrong

Animation, General, Interesting, Videogame History, Videogame Research

Finding That Damn Game

Wow, how hard is it to find an item on the internet you don’t know the name of? Especially something reasonably obscure? In this case, it’s my partial area of expertise; videogames. Let’s see, and also handily (for me in the future) I’ll list all the resources I used.

This is a bit odd, I wanted to find an awesome set of animations – pixel art videos – and the only single thing I could remember (after vaguely trying some search terms) was that the artist in question mentioned a game…the game, I recall, was something based on mechanics or something. Might have involved strategy. Turn based? Mmm…DS game, yes!

Had the name of the lead in the title. So I did some searching – Wikipedia is de-facto useless for this kind of thing, consisting of non-cross referenced categories or long lists. No joy there. Mobygames is much better – but in this case, I wasn’t sure what year it was released in – I checked the DS games for 2009 (not there for certain, very limited list) then 2008 (huge list!). No pictures doesn’t help, since I remembered the distinctive art style. Giantbomb was another offering – after some URL mangling, I managed to get DS games only, by release date. Sadly, a few pages in and still no luck – and the search functions didn’t work too well on either site – “mechanic” (all I could really remember at that point) didn’t come up with anything.

Stuck! Darn it, that damn game, you know, on the DS, which I’ve not actually played…

Mmm…strategy…mmm, not in those categories on Mobygames, so coming again at it, defence was involved…towers…tower defence! To the Google machine! Google helped out – my final ridiculous search string found a reference – 3rd one, “Lock’s Quest”! Yes, matches with what I thought it was!

Finally, I found it! Now…credits…credits! Come to daddy! No credits! No credits!…wait…try agian… yes! Credits! (Via Google). GameFAQ’s is a merge between Gamespot’s DB and it’s own (now it’s just the same thing, long ago it wasn’t, but GameFAQ’s is easier and faster to search at least).

(In addition, IGN was a bit useless, and there are not many other game DB’s that either game up in Google, or in fact I know of. I need to search any more reputable ones out for this kind of work).

So, finally found the game – a victory for my memory!

However, the person isn’t on the credits list! How did I find this out? Yep, for starters, there appears to be no artists listed – I vaguely recalled the person referencing it as freelance work – but I couldn’t be sure, so I checked the people on the list. No go!

So, down to Google again – I had the game (Lock’s Quest), the item (pixel art video) and the person (artist). Some massive amounts of variations later…I had it! The 3rd link down, a name I recognised – Paul Robertson!

How can I be sure it is him? Well, his site is down (as of posting this) so no luck there, but it was a blog post. I took a site: Google search and found it, a post about what games he’s worked on – as an animator (a type of artist, so I was close). Lock’s Quest stuck out mainly because it was the one place I saw it to investigate “What on earth it was” – at the time I had no idea it existed 🙂

I’ve now got his site in my RSS feed (he has some really, really great pixel animations – a lot are bizarre, most are plain amazing, many are bizarre and amazing). The films I wanted to re-watch after losing them (heaven knows where they’ve gone on in my files) were Kings of Power 4 Billion %, and the earlier, and I think actually much cooler one Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006. Best to download them (the pixel art otherwise suffers), there are valid links on both – or check Google for the titles. Amazing works of art.

So, now, whew, finally finished – all told, took about 1.5hours including writing this mainly as I went. Internet detective work can be done frankly really quickly, although finding something without knowing it’s name is still damn hard – a person or a game!

I’ve still got a game I need to find actually – one from my days playing DOS games, it was a demo at least I played – I am sure it’s a point and click, “sci-fi” game, with the one thing I remember there being is a chain-mail-like shirt made out of credits/coins. It was the most utterly bizarre thing about it, everything else is pretty much just “it was sci-fi with gangs perhaps”. Man, that game annoys the hell out of me for not being able to find it. Older games like this can be really difficult to find if they don’t hold some kind of cult or mass status! Yes, I have asked around, and my damn post now comes top of the Google search for related terms. Hah! Thanks me! 🙁 Sadly, after trying for a few minute on Mobygames and remembering I’d only notice it by picture (who knows if anyone has any of it), and that I don’t know the platform specifically, the game maker, name, or year of release (even an estimate) it’s a bit futile. No where seems to have “point and click” as a mechanics genre either, odd that, or I missed where it was listed.

Edit: Actually, after checking, there are no such things as “point and click” it appears in any game DB, heh. They’re “Adventure” in most places, “Puzzle Solving” on Mobygames too. Still not worth checking everything in this list for it though. At least not yet!

Interesting, Videogame Conferences, Videogame Press, Videogame Research, Videogame Reviews, Videogames

DiGRA 2009 Conclusion

So, here is my conclusion on DiGRA 2009!

I thoroughly enjoyed most of the conference. Lets get over the parts I didn’t enjoy; presenting since I just didn’t feel I did a good job (rushed, little practice), so next time, more practice and less rushing. Vocabulary both needs to be clearer and, simply, have more of it – or at least have it better explained in talks. This might have just been me being an “outsider” though. The programme which was sadly poorly organised, even if the days were actually well organised (3 sessions of 20 minute talks with 10 minutes each for questions). I hope the next one is much better in this regard. 🙂

So the bad is out of the way. The good thing is, I made lots of notes, and will update these more thoroughly with the abstracts and other people’s notes links when I’ve sorted the photographs (since to me, knowing who is who is important!). I did attend a few sessions I didn’t take notes on for bad reasons – transcript reading and incomprehensibility (then again, others might love these, but I stand by what I have put up mainly since the actual papers they’ve done might be much better!), and of course there were at least 5 times the amount of sessions then those I attended.

The breadth of research was quite good (noting so little I saw!) – with a high proportion of MMO/Virtual Worlds research (which I’m only half interested in), but a lot of good things on design, criticism and journalism (more needed!), technical aspects and issues like sex, gender, death, achievements – a whole host of metagame items actually – and art. If you need to find some first point of information on a subject in some detail, it is a good idea to check DiGRA (or research in general) to see if they’ve worked on it first, whatever the area might be.

Sadly the DiGRA proceedings are not freely available (so I’m wary about posting the 70% or so that were available on the CD provided to us), but I’ll get up the preservation ones on the IGDA wiki since they are our own to post up.

Additionally meeting such a varied amount of people from around the world was great. People did know what they were talking about (generally, depending on if they knew about the subject at hand 😉 ), and it was a lot easier discussing topics in person since the papers are pretty hard to read without first reading lots of other papers, and getting a handle on the language used.

There were several good talks (apart from us doing the preservation panel), in date order with a short description of why there was:

Ethics in Videogames Workshop – cut short, but was some good discussion on ethics, moral choices and examples of both. So few examples though, really.

The Achievement Machine: Understanding the Xbox Live Metagame – very “positive” about the effects of achievements, the paper itself likely is much better and more in-depth then the limited 20 minutes he had to explain the entire recent history of achievements.

“Remembering How You Died”: Memory, Death and Temporality in Videogames – Very rough cut since it isn’t full research, but interesting comparisons between Hindu death and rebirth comparisons with games.

Sex and Videogames: A Case of Misappearance and More Than Just a Combo of Slaps? Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Trans Gaming give good overviews of sex and LGBT activity in games. Not much analysis, though.

“You Played That?” Game Criticism Meets Games Studies – a call to do critical writing as academics, with a mix of game journalism questions, examples of good writing and how to do critical writing, reasons it is necessary and the problems with game reviews. A great presentation The New Gatekeepers? On the occupational ideology of game journalists brings to light the problems with European (specifically Dutch, Finland areas) game “journalism”, although Americans did say it mirrors America. More research into the area is needed – I hope to write a piece on the history of game journalism (with it’s pitfalls and all) at some point, but I doubt it’ll readily change without more critical dialogue on the subject. I wonder if they discuss it with themselves often (I’ve not heard of a “Videogame Journalists Conference” as it were).

What I Don’t Want To Hear About MMOs was a fine ranty keynote on MMO research, with some valid points for many types of game research.

Evolution of the tetromino-stacking game: An historical design study of Tertris – a history paper – basically, boils down to reciting the fascinating and long history of Tetris, especially “what is Tetris” as a whole. I have permission to upload the paper somewhere significant for the Digital Game Canon project, which is great (also, 20 minutes is not nearly enough time to recite the history of Tetris).

Gameplay Design Patterns for Game Dialogues was pretty inspiring – basically, recounts the various ways of “dialogue” in games (usually dialogue trees) and puts forwards ways of improvement (more in the paper then the presentation), all while acknowledging the massive amount of work it is.

A little on other things; the conference location was okay – Brunel as a whole is nice neat little university. The London Tube is pretty random, so I missed my original train back, annoyingly, so that’s £35 for me not leaving early enough and no seat until Bedford. I would have loved something organised in the evening apart from the conference dinner – an (optional) game thing or quick pub quiz is always nice, but that’s just me sometimes. The games at the event – well, I’ve no idea who won them for starters (a proper closing talk would have been great) but they were okay, just not my thing (twitter was one of them). I don’t know about the Keynote placement either – if there hadn’t been one cancelled, 4 in a row would have been killer. I guess spreading them out would have been nice (1 a day?), but it doesn’t matter much since 3 in the afternoon would (and did in this case) work.

The actual way of presenting – 20 minutes to do it/10 minutes for questions was okay – sometimes much too short, sometimes much too long depending on the topic and speaker. At least it only meant you had to be board for 30 minutes if you really didn’t enjoy the talk, but vice versa you hadn’t enough time to get all the information from some sessions – but the fact there were submitted papers helps mitigate that significantly.

So, that about wraps up DiGRA. I’ll probably do some pieces inspired by DiGRA in the future, and I hope to get in contact with some of those I saw at the event about their material. First comes sorting out my gallery though 🙂

Events, Videogame Conferences, Videogames

DiGRA 2009

I’m at DiGRA 2009 right now, and due to actual available wifi, I’m putting up my raw notes as-is online right away – woo, this must be what people call live-blogging (sans twitter, I am not even tempted by the game they have on twitter 😉 ).

Check my notes out, and I’ll get photos up as appropriate when I’ve got new gallery software sorted, and I’ll do some kind of conclusion when I’m done with the week!

IGDA, Videogame History

IGDA.org’s Treasures

igda logo
igda logo

The old IGDA site will be closing down, with a new site put in place, sometime – I presume – next month. In the mean time I’ve done some automated, and just recently some entirely manual preservation of the site. I still need to confirm the original site will be preserved, or better put online as archived pages.

In any case, now is a good a time as any to say there are some rather unknown but great articles and words on the site, just very difficult to find! Most of it is under the aptly named Content section, so it’s worth digging yourself of course…

The Articles section hasn’t been updated for a few years, but contains some nice, lengthy articles. Some good reports, good opinion pieces and some factual works too. Work a check out 🙂 – I just wish there were more new ones… 🙂

Out of the various Columns, only 3 are currently active (I presume paid for, and come out monthly). All 3 are worth reading themselves – if only for the entertainment, although as advice and opinions they are well informed and extremely on the mark.

The archives are good too, Famous Last Words by Jim Charne goes into a lot of legal and contract topics (fascinating stuff, even if not all American law applies to the UK for me) – no wonder he got an award for MVP award in 2006 🙂

Matt Sakey goes in-depth into culture and related areas in Culture Clash – a highly recommended read. The great thing about the archives is the additional reading material links (if they still work). He also gets down on culture more often at his Tap-Repeatedly site (formerly the quirky-named Four Fat Chicks), which I’d also urge a read or search of the archives 🙂

The Games Game by Tom Sloper does a good job, and entirely applicably still in the archives, give great advice to students and those looking for industry jobs. A lot is basic, but there are some things worth learning there for sure 🙂

Finally, the closed columns!

The Ivory Tower is fascinating – I’ve not read nearly enough of it yet to give a full comment, but I’d say this would be something worth bringing back – or doing more ad-hoc articles for the IGDA site in the same vein. Lots of writers I recognise, with good topics – on games at the time, the collaboration of academia and industry and much more. I will be making enquiries at DiGRA if I have a chance on if this would ever be restarted!

Miller Time by Scott Miller is a fun little read, stopped short it appears. Since 3d Realms is now in the area known as “mostly dead”, seeing the old words from the owner back when Duke Nukem Forever wasn’t so much a joke is interesting.

Finally, Words of Wisdom is a nice look at luminaries’ quotes – not enough of this is done I think, more is needed so people can be called out on repeating rubbish or changing views or being hypocritical – but this column was more just for advice for new people, sought out by Barbara Walter, who I can’t find online (but appeared to be a recruiter, and worked the moderation of the newbie forum at the time).

I’d love to see more of all of this on the IGDA site! 🙂

There are also some well-worth-reading white papers and other material in the Papers and Reports section – a wee bit old now, but some is still highly relevant and not out of date at all. It misses out any kind of new papers (from around 2006 onwards unless it links to a more up to date page), which is a big shame.

PS: I’m still working on other posts, but without a gallery which, yes, I’m still looking into, I’m reserving those for when I can upload pictures 🙂

DS Videogames, Events, Indie Videogames, Videogames

Gambling Lambs #1

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Who's a Werewolf eh?

Gambling Lambs went on yesterday evening, and lo, it was good, involving:

  • Me learning finally how to do bits of a Rubik’s cube, thanks to David 🙂 (I’ve forgotten the exact combinations now but I get the theory). He knows his l33t cubes.
  • Being on film for a local BBC documentary on videogames and games (which is due September – but I’ve no idea what the name was)
  • Playing the brilliant Werewolf again, 3 rounds – me and two werewolves killed then entire village of Gibraltar the first time, but I got wasted the next 2 rounds in the first night! (one of which the villages won). I was obviously a very loud victorious werewolf to start with! (the second time was bad though because the werewolf who killed me, while he did think I was a werewolf in the first round, got my sherrifs badge in the second to make amends! Bah, politics 🙂 ).
  • Got to play a little World of Goo, and more importantly showed the indie game to others (I personally get stuck rather easily, but puzzle people loved it).
  • Some awesome rounds of Mario Kart DS 🙂
  • Trading with myself between Pokemon Diamond and Pokemon Platinum. Sooo worth it 😉
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It was a tad dark down there – the flash was entirely necessary, as my gallery shows. At least I met a lot of cool people there in the dimness 🙂

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The problem is next time, the first Thursday of September is when I’m going to DiGRA, so it’ll be all the way in October before I get to try things like Settlers of Catan which I fully intend to play. Anyone else in the Nottingham area at the time however should give it a shot 🙂 Bring what you want to play too and see if anyone wants to play, is always an idea, but there is plenty of things people bring to play of course.

Uncategorised

Battling WordPress and Gallery Software

2 Comments

I’m still looking at Gallery2 replacements, I suspect I’ll be summarising what I think of the ones I’m checking out (since I need it to work on this webserver setup, I do do some of the testing live, so hooray for random links appearing 😉 ). I’ve got some links to follow up from my hosts’ forums, and specifically am looking for 3 things – automatic page creation and allowing gallery subpages, thumbnails available for WordPress posts and that it works properly with WordPress 2.8. If anyone does use one, give me a shout which it is. I’m going to retest NextGEN which is the most well known WordPress one (despite its, to me, seemingly highly beta status), then move onto other solutions. The battle began with me basically reinstalling the latest WordPress and fixing it’s own internal gallery upload system (the flash bit failed to work until I used the internal SSL admin side, rather then the AdminSSL plugin for instance). I won’t back down now, even though this is taking forever. In the mean time I’ll use Gallery2 to upload bits and pieces, and wait to get around to my notes from Brighton with associated pictures.

It’s never easy, is it? Hopefully this might help someone else who wants a good bit of gallery software so they don’t have to use the admittedly-nice-looking Flickr or somesuch, since I do certainly want to self-host these images, and not rely on things like “term of use” and “ownership rights”, sigh.

Animation, Interesting

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni

Madness!
Madness!

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni was recommended to me by members of Namsoc – so I went ahead, knowing it was going to be a rather strange mystery-psychological-crazy series. This might contain minor spoilers, but nothing much – I wrote most of this before the final episodes of the first series, and you really need to watch both series’ to get the entire thing.

Continue reading Higurashi no Naku Koro ni →

IGDA, Travel, Videogame Conferences

Develop 2009 Roundup

develop09 whitebg

The Develop Conference was good this year – I have notes to write up, some interesting ones, which I hope to sort once I do my gallery up with some new software (this has but a few of the ones I took with my new camera, and I’ll link to the notes here and in a minipost when they are up). I’m glad I went, and I think that not wasting holiday time is pretty important 🙂

Some CA's
Some CA's

The main thing was I got to talk to some great CA’s this year – who I also got to instruct them in the ways of Werewolf too. I also saw One Life Left (and participated!), although it seems it won’t be put up as a podcast, we’ll see. There was also Never Mind the Polygons, which was great. Much good discussion was had, and I caught up with some other people too.

I also put forward to the CA’s about the student SIG and got some positive and some muddling feedback, which I’ve taken on board 😀

Sadly, the IGDA presence was limited. I missed the Women in Games lunch (One Life Left was on at the same time), although this wasn’t strictly IGDA. The local chapter, from all reports is dead 🙁 a great opportunity there missed, especially since evening activities were limited – recession hitting in I guess!

Fear the Flaming Brighton Pier!
Fear the Flaming Brighton Pier!

The one thing I did miss, entirely unrelated to games, was having time to swim in the sea. It was actually rather sunny on the first day, but I lacked the time – there was bag packing to do, and in addition the Guardian Games Quiz – where we got a 20/20 for our brilliant “Brighton Pier on Fire” demonic monster 🙂

I also picked up Warhammer Mark of Chaos: Battle March – a mouthful to be sure. It didn’t change the original game much, but provided a good deal of fun for the reduced £4 price – the campaign has some quite fun missions (although I lament not being able to play the Dwarfs still, and I couldn’t get online). I might get around to writing something up about it, we’ll see.