Concerning PS3 Trophies, 360 Achievements and Nintendo not joining the party

I had to confess recently to being something of a Trophy Whore.

For the uninitiated, Trophies (on the Playstation 3 - the XBox 360 equivalent is Achievements) are a ticklist of tasks which can be completed within a game. However rather than simply existing within the game itself, these awards are connected with your online profile. Even if you uninstall and sell on the game, the legacy of your actions in that game live on through your ID.


There is a great variety between titles as to the kinds of trophies offered and the skill required to achieve them (more on that later), but they typically involve awards for getting through certain parts of the game, completing the game on different skill settings, unlocking all in-game features and trying all of the game modes. Genre-dependent, other trophies are for things like winning a set number of online matches, beating a target speed-run time, getting all the women in the game to like you...

Then there are the random trophies which are even genre dependent, but based upon the title itself: I've got trophies for everything from "flipping the bird" to a cop in Mirror's Edge, performing a successful barrel roll in Wipeout HD, flying a helicopter under all the bridges in GTA IV to spending a target amount of money on courtesans in Assassin's Creed II.

Generally speaking, gaining all the trophies for a particular title will gain you the Platinum trophy on PS3 - or similar accolade on XBox.

The top trophies are meant to be an indication of real skill, but sometimes that doesn't work and the skill required to beat all challenges varies greatly from game to game. Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time (HD re-release) features a platinum trophy which can be gained in a few evening's careful play. Wipeout Fury, on the other hand, features trophies which are pretty painful. Complete 20 Zones without hitting the sides of the track? I should co-co!

My PSN card. I have a surprising number of trophies for a fitness game.

I can generally tell at a glance if I'm going to try for the platinum having taken a look at the trophies on offer. I'm currently playing Brutal Legend and I'm pretty sure the challenges offered aren't for me, heavily reliant as they are on multiplayer success: not something at which I excel these days and also a viral trophy dependent on find another player who already has it.

I didn't think I was a trophy whore for a while, because in my mind trophy whores are people who play, buy or download games specifically because they offer a cheap or easy Platinum trophy. There's something very arbitrary about playing simply to boosts one's own player score.

However I did find myself recently choosing to not bother playing a game because it didn't offer trophies. That sounds a bit trite - actually I had a choice between two games in a series and I chose the title with trophy support over the older title without. I also felt a little pang of disappointment when I realised that neither Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light or Costume Quest offered a platinum trophy for 100% completion. (especially since Lara Croft GoL presented a steeper challenge than many other games!)

It led me to wonder where my own fascination with trophies comes from. Also, having read recently that the Nintendo 3DS will not feature an achievements system I found myself disagreeing with the sentiment, feeling that the system will be somehow incomplete without this peripheral feature.

In that article, Nintendo's Bill Trinen is quoted as saying "When they create their games, [Nintendo's designers] don't tell you how to play their game in order to achieve some kind of mythical reward... Basically, the way the games are designed is they're designed for you to explore the game yourself and have this sense of discovery."

I disagree with that statement for the first reason I love achievements and trophies. I find they encourage me to attempt things in the game it would not have occurred to me to try unless someone had suggested it. That's not to say that the trophy system diminishes my sense of intelligent exploration - it just shapes it into a target to hit.

Costume Quest + Platinum: What I'd like to see

Take GTA IV for example. It doesn't take a genius to realise that one of the first things you are going to attempt when you first grab a helicopter is to fly under one of the city's bridges. That "sense of discovery" comes naturally to gamers - it's why we love the medium. However, without a pointer (and a system to keep track of progress) would I have spent a very entertaining hour or so flying around the city to try and fly under all the bridges in the game? Probably not.

Similarly, GTI Club+ offers a couple of trophies for the following: get a carwash and still win a race and win a race by turning around and reversing over the finish line. This adds a great sense of fun to the experience and really enhances the challenge available.

Done well (and we'll all played games with trophies clearly added as an afterthought) the trophies available for a game add to the game experience - they integrate with the gameplay, provide additional replay value and expand your skill with the game. Batman Arkham Asylum is a great example of Trophies implemented well. The combo achievements encourage you to raise your game in terms of melee fighting accuracy, and some of the trophies help expand side plots featuring the ridder and the Spirit of Arkham.

It is true to say that you can implement these kinds of objectives and rewards in-game. Batman Arkham Asylum would be the same game without trophies - you could simply move the achievements to an in-game menu and live without a unified achievements system.

But what is fun about the trophy system is sharing your achievements with others. If I have a friend playing the same game as me I can look at their trophy list and gauge how far along they are with a game - even provide a bit of help if they need it.

Sure there's an element of competition - but isn't it nice to be able to add a bit of friendly competition even to games with little or no multiplayer element?

Metroid Prime 3 had quite a nice idea - when you complete the game it posts a screenshot of the "game complete" screen to your message board on the Wii with a percentage of completion. Unfortunately, the Wii's message board is a bit useless and can't be navigated with ease or readily shared with friends. But I like the idea - beyond trophies or achievements - that you can take a snapshot of your experiences with a game and record them for posterity.

You only get a view like this through trying to get all the trophies

I think my love of trophies comes down to a feeling of completeness; of closure. This is purely a personality issue, but with so many games offering replay value and open worlds to explore (even after the main game is completed) I often feel that there I some games I never finished - just abandoned. Having a checklist of specific tasks to complete does at least give me a sense of closure with a game.

It's also a way of recording memories. We all play so many games and have so many experiences. If you have trophies, take a stroll down memory lane and take stock of some of the things you have achieved and experiences in the games you have played.

I'd like more games to capture memories. I'd like to be able to play back what I just did and take photo snapshots of incredible moments I witnessed, hilarious mishaps I encountered or poignant beats that spoke to me. To quote Blade Runner, "I have seen things you people would not believe ... all those moments will be lost like tear-drops in the rain."

The launch article for Game People's Novel Gamer column

What follows is my first Novel Gamer column for Game People. This is also available as a podcast, and there are iTunes and RSS subscriptions available.

To summarise, Novel Gamer is a feature in which I tell a short story, based on my experiences of playing a game. It's a 50/50 hybrid of fiction and critical analysis. Hopefully you'll come away entertained and informed about a game.

Starfox Command DS: An interview with the legendary frontman of the group, Fox McCloud

It was a few days ago my publisher called me up about the chance to interview one of the most iconic and enigmatic figures of the last decade. Clearly this was a great chance to talk to a most influential artist. I was a little surprised when the subject matter of the discussion was a focus on StarFox Command. When compared against such classics as the legendary StarFox 64 (known in the UK as Lylat Wars) how is that we came to be talking about this particular release?

These days, McCloud keeps up a trendy apartment in west London which he uses when he’s in the UK on business. It’s in that part of the city so favoured by the select and which is home to many artists and retired performers – actors of the old school, retired rock-stars and their peers.

McCloud’s rooms had a new-age air to them. Oriental fabrics and incense burners lined the walls, on which sat the framed gold discs of Lylat Wars and StarFox Adventures.

The man himself dispensed with the formalities and insisted I call him Fox. I began by asking him about the group and its impact on the genre. He pushed the glowing end of a stub into a full ashtray and leant forward, his eyes glittering with memories of the old days.

"I keep meaning to give up!" he grinned, "It was a crazy time, man. Ninty just came at us with all this new equipment and said to me and Falco, what can you guys do with it?"

I asked him if he’s referring to Nintendo’s Mode7 chip, which for many households represented their first experience of a moving 3D surface.

"Yeah, yeah, guy, that was it. So we said to the suits, ‘man if you’re gonna give me something that looks like flying, then I wanna fly!’ ha ha ha!"

"So," I pressed, "you feel that the StarFox group was about technical innovation?"

"That was a part of it, sure," Fox leant back, a serious expression now on his face; "but it was about creativity and experimentation. The story and the characters had to be top-notch. That’s why were we excited about Command, man! We’d always been too big and our shows too technically demanding for the little consoles. Finally here was a handheld venue capable of holding a StarFox show – and we were stoked about it I can tell ya."

"What was your reaction to it?"

"I thought the controls were crazy when they first pitched it to me. They showed me how the ship could be flown entirely by drawing the stylus on the screen. The only button used was for firing! I said to the engineers – I admit I was a bit rude in those days – what the … y’know … what the ‘F’ do you think you’re doing? There’s a perfectly functional D-Pad and on the other side you’ve got buttons for Boost, Brake, Shoot and Loop. Use the shoulders for Bomb and Flip! It seemed obvious to me but the tech guys talked about wanting to avoid something they called ‘Metroid Claw’ and got me to try the Stylus control."

"What did you think?"

A big smile crept across McCloud’s face. "It was like experiencing all the material again for the first time! Seriously, with only a bit of practice, the way that ship responded to the slightest touch? It was like leading her by the nose past buildings, down gulleys and through those … those hoops that give you power-ups?" I nodded. "We could never have got that kind of control with a pad, never!"

"And the stylus, of course," I prompted him, "was also used for the strategy sections after which this entry is named."

"That was a gamble," McCloud admits, "y’see with this release we wanted to put the audience in control. The first StarFox was a really linear ride; with Command we wanted to say to the player: ‘here are the bad guys; here’s the world; you choose when and where to fight them’. We gave them a limited number of turns to clean up each area but you should have seen the way these guys flew the missions! There were worlds we thought would take 4 or 5 turns to clear, but some of the real fans figured out how to chain refuel stations and how to draw your fighter’s interception path to catch many squadrons at once: they cleared the map in a couple of turns. Just incredible! Plus you had to use the stylus to scratch away the ‘fog’ that covered the enemies position – most fans figured out the limited tool only allowed small bits of the covered territory to be cleared so they just figured out ways to make it work."

"So really," I asked McCloud, "StarFox Command’s greatest legacy is allowing the player to improvise with the material."

McCloud nodded vigorously at this, "defo! Got it in one. Even with the combat missions it was all about giving the player choice. It was pretty easy to kill the enemy squadron but we filled the area with secondary and tertiary enemies that gave huge bonuses if you clear everyone out. It became less about whether you could clear the level and more about how you beat the level. Doing it with style for maximum points! Not to mention the time bonus strategy!"

I had to admit that I thought I had missed that.

"Aww, that was a great strategy! We set the ship up so that, if you did a barrel-roll while taking fire, then you deflect the enemy shots and gain 2 seconds, right? Well some of the fans figured out that it was a good idea to keep some of the anti-air towers around – that way, if you run short on time you just goad the towers into shooting at you and you can rack up extra seconds! All about personal expression, man; all about it…"

I decided to bring up the issue of Command’s position in the overall series of StarFox releases. I asked if he felt it was a departure for the series.

"People have the wrong idea about StarFox, man," he shook his head at this; he seemed quite sad. "People think of this epic space adventure going on story after story … but they forget. StarFox 64 or Lylat Wars or whatever you want to call it was a remake of the original StarFox. We started again with new technology and new freedom to explore. We never got a shot at the Wii. The GameCube versions mixed it up with ground vehicles and walking sections and the other one was a third-person adventure game. In many ways, StarFox Command is the truest StarFox release to date. It’s like we were looking for the perfect version of space combat with story. Command has its own ambience and flavour. All with full 360-degree control rather than on-rails. It’s the follow-up album the original deserved."

"How do you feel," I asked him, "about the suggestion that it was short?"

"Totally wronged! I mean, we made a choice to make each story thread quite short. Sure, you can play it from start to a finish in a couple of hours. But then we put in nine totally different endings and a branched storyline that gave you all kinda ways to get to them. To see all that Command has to offer, you come back to it again and again. That’s what our fans say: they just keep revisiting it."

I nod. I can see, maybe for the first time, how Command is a forgotten great in StarFox’s history. "Command was also very beautiful."

"Oh yeah," McCloud agreed with this, "we wanted to make it look and sound great on the DS. Corneria City, the deserts, those series of islands in the sea? We were really pleased with the way it looked and sounded. And we introduced internet multiplayer for the first time. That DS Wi-Fi can be a hot ticket if you get it right!"

I thanked Fox McCloud for his time and asked about the upcoming release, a remake of StarFox 64/Lylat Wars for the 3DS.

"I’m looking forward to it. It’s great to see the old material re-mastered on a new format. But I don’t know if it will stick to the original format or not. You see Command gave you a full arena to fly around in, whereas the original StarFox was a fixed flight-path that you moved along. You could position yourself within it, but Command was always where the real freedom was. Away from the tracks…"

I left him sitting amid the trails from the incense candles and presumed that he was returning to ponder the adventures of his past: the mothership-destruction motif that riffs throughout the missions, the characters and their distinctive ships weaving in and out of the storylines and the chance to catch up with old faces.

As I left his rooms and put my thoughts in order I thought about the last time I’d seen StarFox Command. It was on a pre-owned shelf for less than a fiver. It seemed a shame that such a great release – and a landmark for so many reasons – should be so forgotten in the public sphere. But there is a flipside to this story – it does mean that this entry in the StarFox legacy is as easy to pick up and as accessible as it was when it was first released.

And, for such a reasonable price tag, I think I just might revisit it myself.

Time to go public

For a while now, I've been writing articles for Game People. A few of you may have seen me posting links to articles under specific games.

Game People is a games review site with a difference. It offers regulars reviews alongside 'artisan reviews.'

The artisan reviews offer a slightly different perspective on games than the usual literary criticism-style approach. There's the Haiku Gamer - whose reviews take the form of Haiku poetry. There's the Scripted Gamer, who writes and performs a short radio play to review the game. There's also the Musical Gamer, who some of you may know as the wildly successful Rebecca Mayes: Originally from Game People, latterly from The Escapist and recently spreading wings and doing her own thing.

This is about a very different way of looking at games. This is a personal response, an artistic response: a sideways look at a games content in order to judge it by merits beyond those of the "typical" gaming demographic.

Game People's regular reviews also come with a twist. Everyone has a perspective - a unique approach to how they come to the games they play. Whether they are coming from the approach of a parent, a lapsed gamer, a co-op gamer, a techie, a teenager or a board gamer - these are personal and reflective responses to the world of gaming.

How do I fit into this? Well, if everyone has a story then I have several. Sometimes the only way to communicate a point is through parable. Our world is full of stories and synonyms. I write stories, simply put.

Stories which entertain in their own right; stories which represent a personal response to a game's individual character; stories which, if nothing else, provide a break from the usual language we associate with game reviews.

Known henceforce as the Novel Gamer, my tales aim to both tell a story and make a critical point or two about the games themselves. This is complementary creativity - a sideshow to the games' own big top.

I hope you'll come with me and enjoy the journey.

My column goes live on Monday 17th January, with fortnightly stories and podcasts. Get a sneak peak at the first article here.

Why I won't be playing Nintendo's latest diving-inspired game

I love the Endless Ocean games.

I'm a diver myself; although the Endless Ocean series cannot replicate the charm and thrill of real diving it does have the same relaxing feel of floating through a hidden world simply for the pleasure of taking a look at what there is to see and exploring secret places.

It's not without it's inaccuracies in terms of the game's approach to the technique of diving; however, with Endless Ocean there appears to be an awareness of some of the detail of the sport: air is consumed more at greater depth, air is also consumed under stressful circumstances and specialised breathing equipment is required for deep dives.

Nintendo have recently released demos for some of their WiiWare releases. I thought I'd take a look at Dive: The Medes Island Secret. It has a similar visual fidelity to Endless Ocean but utilises a fixed side-scrolling camera and is akin to the retro Sinclair Spectrum game, Scuba Dive (pictured).



The game takes as its premise the search for lost gold in a Mediterranean stretch of coast. However this game almost immediately horrified me in its portrayal of the sport and the underwater environment.

You enter the sea armed with a spear gun. Fish or plants that block your path are to be shot; especially fish which "attack" in the game, depicted in the demo as Lionfish - a fish which in nature present little or no aggressive behaviour towards humans. Most injuries are as a result of divers carelessly swimming into their venomous spines.

It's bad enough that careless fishing, reckless or thoughtless divers and large shipping damage the marine life in our seas. To depict a game in which the fish can be targeted and shot with a spear is incomprehensible to me and certainly should not be present in a game based upon the sport of Scuba Diving.


In Endless Ocean, the fish are there to be studied and observed. True, in Endless Ocean 2, the player is provided with a "gun" of sorts which is used to pacify aggressive predators and heal sick fish, but this device is a suitable science-fiction idea it provides little to suggest the fish are to be harmed. In Dive, however, the fish cannot be interacted with at any level beyond shooting - in spite of the in-game shops assertion that the spear is a "tranquiliser" this is clearly a post-production addition as the in-game animation shows fish which have been shot turning upside down and floating to the surface. It is clearly a weapon designed to kill.

The ignorance of the sport does not end there. I was briefly impressed that the game depicted Oxygen Toxicity damaging the player's health when attempted to swim below a 60m depth. However, when I looked in the in-game shop for items the game depicts a "special wetsuit" which must be used for deep dives.

Research is important in any game which depicts real life sports, people or events. Dive: The Medes Island Secret displays a complete ignorance of the sport and a lack of sensitivity to the issues we have created for the marine environment.

I would heartily recommend both Endless Ocean titles for anyone looking for a reasonable replication of the sport of Scuba Diving.

A response to the Guardian article "Can women be 'real' gamers?"

The original article can be found at http://t.co/e8Vl1sv

I'm not really sure what point the article was trying to make, but it struck me that it represented quite a dated view of our perception of 'female gamers.'

Gaming is growing. That isn't just because the whole male demographic now feels it is acceptable to play videogames as a pastime; gaming is growing because it is learning to try different things and different styles. It is these approaches which have demonstrated how to not only capture the female market, but also the mature and elderly market.

Rather than simply waiting for the first true gaming generation (now arguably approaching their late thirties) to age, some game developers like Nintendo have taken the market in hand and produced games for a wider audience.

Anyhow - this is my comment from the comments section of the article:

*****************************************

I think you missed quite a lot of the impact of various games on female gamers over the years.

It is true that the majority of titles which seem to be ones which people think of and refer to as "games" seem to appeal largely to a male audience. But is it really rocket science to see that games based around shooting, motor racing or driving are aiming at a majority male audience? (although that's not to say that some of these games, like their equivalent in film or TV don't attract female fans).

I have a number of female gaming friends and the games which are popular among them are games like Assassin's Creed, Heavy Rain, Monster Hunter and particularly the Lego movie-tie-ins.

I think it's enormously contentious to suggest that women's time is any more precious than men's. I think we all commit time to the activities we enjoy and I would say that if games have not been designed with a broad appeal to the whole audience then sections of that audience will switch off after a few hours or minutes. I'd say that games such as The Sims, Animal Crossing and Theme Park have demonstrated that games full of complex gameplay that often require a large time commitment have proved popular with female gamers over the years.

While headline grabbing games like Call of Duty do continue the image of games aimed at 18-25 male audiences this represents a very small part of the gaming landscape (albeit perhaps not the financial landscape).

GameCity5 - Day Three - Kinecting with people

The subject of new Microsoft hardware brings me to the afternoon session, in which Nick Burton (Executive Producer of Technology and Communications) demonstrates Kinect Sports and discusses some of Kinect's potential.

I have to say up-front that huge question marks still hang over the viability of Kinect in my own mind. In spite of Nick's assertion that Kinect can allow for coffee tables obscuring feet and smaller living spaces, by their own admission Rare re-modelled their entire office space from cubicles to open plan in order to make working on Kinect more feasible. The stage used for the presentation was enormous and I wonder how many people live in homes in which the Kinect will work (especially given the casual market Microsoft are targeting with this product).

Nick introduces the Sports package with enthusiasm and it is clear that some considerable though has gone into translating these sports into meaningful actions. Football is distilled into a series of passing choices across the field culminating in a final shot at the goal. Discus seems intuitive and even javelin affords the player a convincing run-up and launch.

What is immediately apparent however is that there are two unexpected and fascinating emergent behaviours created by Kinect's approach. The first nice touch is that, because Kinect is capable of tracking multiple individuals, you have to raise your hand at the beginning of each game to indicate that you wish to take part. This is a lovely child-like form of interaction that will have most people giggling the first time they play.

The second and more important emergent element that comes out of Kinect's continuous tracking is that ALL of your body motion is mapped to the player avatar. It's immediately obvious, now that you see a motion-captured avatar standing next to the AI figures just how different and distinct human movement is. Witnessing a game character slouch, or favour balancing weight on one leg or brushing a spec from clothing is all reproduced by the game system. This leads on to an important emergent behaviour:playing with and showing off through the avatar. All the players who took part in the Kinect demonstration instinctively put their avatars through victory celebrations after scoring, through arms in the air, dancing and air guitaring (no pelvic thrusts though, in spite of the amount of 3rd person shooters that offer this as a victory salute). In fact it became more noticeable when players wanted to make their characters display behaviour at a time when the game didn't seem to want to track their actions. This may lead to developers forcing games to map player movement to avatars at all times.

I did ask Nick Burton about how this very different control system might inform new kinds of game and new interactions within games rather than sports or other more traditional/existing genres. He was fairly reluctant to share many of Rare's prototype ideas, as you can imagine, but he did insist that a lot of crazy suggestions had been put forward and even prototyped. He discussed a kind of alternative reality, because the Kinect camera makes a 3D model of your living space and is more than capable of identifying individual objects like sofas, tables etc and can even render your space with different lighting, as the base lighting can be derived from the image. He talked about ideas like turning the floor of your room to lava, forcing players to climb on an available seat.

He also talked about Kinect "enhanced" features which support traditional gaming more readily. The instinctive tilt of the head when steering a racing game or peering around a corner in an FPS can now be read by Kinect and fed into the game. Combined with voice recognition there is a good potential for Kinect to provide supporting functionality for games, freeing-up the primary controller for main actions.

In summary, Kinect represents a remarkable piece of technology, implemented very simply and transparently. It's undeniable the potential is there for some remarkable changes in gaming, but my personal opinion is that it is in danger of a cautious market and difficult local (environment) conditions which may cause it to fall into the sports and casual market to which the Wii has largely succumbed.

Also, because of the need to keep looking at the screen, actions such as turning or looking around have to be faked, which is counter intuitive.

For me, if you could combine the body tracking of Kinect with a decent VR headset... now there's a killer app! Given that Kinect has a flawless understanding of your position in 3D space, imagine being able to view a 3D immersive scene and reach out to grab an in-game item. In short I still feel that Kinect combined with a fixed screen is a dead end. The workarounds that have to be achieved as a results of needing to keep facing the display screen are obvious with almost every gesture. Combine this with my already negative views on 3D TV (how can it be 3D when the scene is bounded by the frame of the screen?) However it does give clues about a future path to more immersive gameplay. Now I just need to install the Jamiroquai moving floor so I can walk around while remaining still...

After this session, my GameCity became about connecting for real with some people I've only ever met digitally. I met some of the lovely folks from Game People and found a huge amount of common heritage (always nice to meet other people who spent the 90's cherishing the Amiga!) and also got to meet Rebecca Mayes after her marathon 8-hour game creating session with Adam Saltsman. It was nice to be there to see the culmination of their efforts as it happened and witness the unveiling!

All photos courtesy of GameCity with thanks.

GameCity5 - Day Three - Old games and new faces

This morning's Guardian breakfast posed some interesting food for thought: what are the games that marked the most significant milestones in gaming history. Clearly a contentious topic and I won't go in to the list here; I think that most people, when faced with the list, would come up with alternative games that they feel are more significant for different reasons.

It rings true though, that there are certain games which simply change something in your mind about how games work or the potential for games to work. In part of today I saw a group of graduates discussion their first commercial venture, QUBE. As the game is a first-person-puzzler (for want of a better term) it draws comparison to Portal, although there appears to be no desire to add plot or implied narrative to the puzzles.

These two things coming together reminded me what is so startling about Portal. In terms of gameplay it is an extremely clever way to frame a puzzle game. What is more remarkable is the way in which a rich narrative is told without any secondary characters (apart from the voice), cutscenes or story events. As a distinction from, say, Myst - which is an adventure game with puzzles inserted - Portal is a puzzle game with a rich, hidden narrative. It's like being presented with a wordsearch in which the shape of the lines form words across consecutive pages to read "HELP ME IAM HELD PRIS ONER".

All of which mental wanderings bring me to the second of Jonathan Blow's presentations which I attended about his new game The Witness. Loved by many for creative the 2D time-shifting platform-puzzler Braid, many were, perhaps, surprised to find that his new project is set in a 3D environment with first-person controls. Chris Hecker (Spy Party) was in the position, as friend of Jonathan, to ask the inevitable cheeky question: "So what do you say to the young developers we are always telling to avoid 3D and make 2D games?"

Jonathan laughs, caught out. "We always say," he tells the audience, "the worst mistake is to make a 2D indie game ... make a decent amount of money to fund future development and then try something ambitious and obscure in 3D that no-one wants to play and lose all your money ... I'd never recommend to anyone to do what I'm doing."

But the reason for this departure is a deep love of adventure games, or a least a deep love of what adventure games should be. Speaking on the death of adventure games, Jonathan says "other games evolved to be more playable - adventure games never figured out how to do that." Frustrated by a genre which mostly revolved around hoarding inventory items, randomly combining objects and failing to interact with scenery, Jonathan has set out to make a true adventure game which combines the joy of exploration with environment based puzzles which play by a fair set of rules.

He demonstrates a good set of the opening of the game and it is clear that the player is taught how to understand the puzzles in the game a little at a time, without any text displays or audio prompts. Simple line puzzles build into basic mazes and then evolve into complex mazes with pathing rules. Basic levers are identified early as well as active and inactive switches and through an elegant opening puzzles players are taught how power lines from nearby puzzle stations to environmental objects allow passage.

The game itself was subjective to a blind playtest at Pax, without the gamers being told it was by the Braid creator. "I don't really like feedback," he causes the audience to laugh, "[the pax playtest] was more of a reality check."

There is an obvious disconnect between the puzzles and the setting. Jonathan insists that this is in keeping with the fiction of the story as well as providing a fair interface for players. "In a game like Myst each machine is disguised to go with the scenery so the player spends ages just trying to figure out how the buttons move or if its a screen or whatever."

Following this I had the honour of being invited to a presentation by some students and ex-students from Newport Uni's games design course. Having now witnessed Jonathan Blow describe twice the process of educating a player about the rules of a game it's encouraging to see that these less-experienced graduates have taken on board the same skills. The beta level for Qube (available here at the time of writing) demonstrates this same, structured, non-narrative tutorial guiding the player through the individual rules and behaviours before attempting to combine them and looks very polished indeed at this stage.

There were a range of games displayed by the students. Hannah and Harry's ColourRunners (which I talked about on Wednesday) were there again and another group of students who are turning their final year project into a commercial product. It's encouraging to hear how much support Microsoft have provided to these under-graduates, providing access to hardware and dev kits for the at-the-time unreleased Windows 7 Mobiles.

Speaking of new Microsoft hardware...