work, no play

...but hey, I'm supposed to play games as part of my job! What is going on! :/

Anyway, lot's of sporadic moments spent playing various stuff, but haven't really had the time to concentrate on anything. I ended up reviewing EA Sports' latest NHL game (pretty good), checking out Sega's similar offering ESPN NHL Hockey (better), played a round of the board game Puerto Rico , which is a bit too hardcore strategy for my taste, but at least it was played in good company :).

I should write a review of Viewtiful Joe before other busy things kick in. Next week I'll be travelling, and I'll be away on the coming weekend as well. Maybe I should get a title for my GBA...I've been interested in the minigame-extravaganza Wario Ware for sometime now. If there are some 200 minigames in that one, it would be interesting to analyse how many different mechanics there actually are!

Things to do

My work on game mechanics is meant to lead onto a thorough discussion of genre, but that wil have to wait for a while. At the moment I'm too busy with other tasks, 'real work' so to speak. But, it's not that different - I'm in the process of adapting the design patterns thinking for games of chance, and organising an in-house workshop on those lines in the middle of September.

After that, I'll tackle my mechanics-theme-genre-theory. I guess I should put up a revised version of the Rules paper... then again, probably I'll put the whole 'Formalist trilogy' ;) (rules-mechanics-genre) up when there's a draft ready. October, maybe.

On another note, my paper on game-simulations and Vice City is due to be published in the next (Scandinavian) edition of the net journal Digital Dichtung. I'm pretty pleased with the paper, although it was artitten before my rule and mechanics theories, so I'll have revise it considerably before including it in the thesis. The nice thing is that there should be no serious problems in doing that - rules and mechanics relate to simulations as well.

too tired, too busy

Terribly busy with other stuff, so other than some nearly-obsessive sessions with Winning Eleven 7, I haven't had time to play much of anything. Even Dark Chronicle (that I'm in the process of reviewing) has been shadowed by other things. I have to confess that I should've done the review _before_ WE7 came out... :P

post-seminar rap

The seminar of game studies in Tampere was good: plenty of useful discussion and nice, smart people. Now I'll have to focus on revising and editing my rule paper for the LEVEL UP conference...

Kinetics, Zeroing in

My wrist is aching from too much Viewtiful Joe bullet-time-mach speed-combo-kinetics (- well, my daily 25 km bicycle trip to work might contribute to the ache as well...).

Yeah, I'm wondering if 'kinetics' would be a fitting title for mechanics that are not only the players' means to access the formal structure of the game, i.e. play within the rules, but also fun to execute because they produce kicks in the form of eye-opening animations and impressive sound effects. Like in Rez, or the frantic action in any multiplayer deathmatch. Anyways, the mechanics of VJ keep on fascinating me, even though the going is getting a bit tough for me now on the later levels.

I realised that with a little bit of learning, F-Zero begins to rock. Once you learn to bend those turns in high speed the velocity of the game really kicks in. And some of the tracks are just ill :)

I'll have to start Dark Chronicle today to get the review process going. It also serves as a good reminder of the Japanese RPG mechanics at this stage. I remember playing Grandia II on the DC, and getting completely frustrated with the 'press-the-button-a-zillion-times' dialogue 'mechanics'...

busy, bee-like

I'm pretty busy preparing a draft of the mechanics paper for a small game seminar at the Hyperlab in Tampere next week, with Espen Aarseth visiting...a chance to get some quality feedback!

Meanwhile, Drew Davidson's IGDA Ivory Tower column on game rhetorics is definitely worth reading.

Absolutely viewtiful

Ok, I got two Japanese import games for the Cube on Friday: F-Zero GXand Viewtiful Joe. The former is fast as hell with some stunning graphics. But, at the end of the day, it's run-of-the-mill futuristic racing stuff, me thinks. Optimisation of a genre - perhaps - but nothing more, nothing less.

Then there was the other game. I bough it just out of general interest, after reading some favourable rants on import sites. And oh my god I love it. I can't remember the last time I've been so enthusiastic about a game (ok, Winning Eleven does not count ;).

Viewtiful Joe is absolute gaming bliss. Moreover, it serves my research needs with beautiful harmony of game mechanics that work in combination and relation to the game environments. It's also a showcase of how digital games' mechanics deliver not only means to achieve the games' ends, but top them with audiovisual sensations: cool graphics, sound effects, gimmicks, etc. I believe this is one of the characteristic that makes digital games particular when compared to other forms of games. Viewtiful Joe could not be any other kind of a game.