I was wondering the desert fairly early on in the game and came upon a small camp held by Cesar’s Legion. There were maybe half a dozen soldiers and two slaves, men taken from a town in the South the Legion had raised, and I had a lingering side quest on my Pip-Boy 3000 to save them. From my position on a small hill, I figured I could kill at least three of the soldiers with my sniper rifle, and then pick off the others as they charged me. The problem with this plan, however, was at the time I was on neutral terms with the Legion, meaning I could pass them in the world without them going for my throat. Due to New Vegas’ wonky system where killing members of a faction make the whole group hostile towards you even if you don’t leave anyone alive to tattle, I was in the tricky spot of deciding if it was worth invoking the wrath of an entire army over two slaves, or if I should just move along.

Luckily, a third option presented itself. While surveying my surroundings, I spotted a pair of Giant Radscorpions, horrible creatures that will happily tear through you or anything else in the game that happens to get to close to them, prowling near the camp. I shot one of them, not enough to kill it but enough to get both of them good and angry, then ran in to the Legion camp and past the soldiers with them hot on my heals. The soldiers opened fire on the Radscorpions, the Radscorpions opened up the soldiers, and the two slaves, unarmed and terrified, bolted for the wastes. After that, it was just a matter of chasing after the slaves to free them while their captors were busy with the giant bugs I’d sicced on them. Quest complete, no harm to my standing with the Legion, and everybody wins, except for a handful of slaver jerks and two monsters nobody liked to begin with.

There are lots of other moments in Fallout: New Vegas, of course. There’s a tangled story with loads of choices to make along the way, complete with different outcomes and consequences based on which way you go. There are companions to meet and befriend, a settlement of Super Mutants to discover in an old ski lodge, and of course more underground Vaults to explore, many complete with their own horrible secrets. As fun as many of them are, though, what sticks with me the most about the game is the same thing I loved so much about Fallout 3 – the massive world it all happens in, and the potential for random stories that are all my own to happen there. Unfortunately for New Vegas, it’s how far short its Nevada desert setting falls of its predecessor’s Capital Wasteland that I remember more than most of what I did there.

There’s just not a lot to do there. Oh, sure, there’s multiple warring factions, which makes things interesting, and the writing and variety of voice actors in Obsidian’s game are overall better than in Bethsoft’s Fallout 3 (that said, I can’t tell you how happy I was to get to the part of the game where I had the chance to silence Matthew Perry’s strangely monotone drone forever), but when it comes to the setting, there’s no contest. For a wasteland, the world of Fallout 3 was teeming with secrets to uncover, random scenes scripted or otherwise to stumble upon, and countless opportunities to take on a given situation from any of a dozen different ways. My favorite moments in the game come in the second half, when the landscape is dotted with Enclave patrols and checkpoints, many of which you tend to find trading shots with the local populace or wildlife. New Vegas has these to a degree (another fun memory: travelling with NCR patrols or merchants and their body guards along dangerous roads, watching them get attacked by Cesar’s Legion, and then looting the losers, all while getting safe passage to wherever I was headed), but not nearly to the same degree. Fallout 3 certainly had its flaws, but it more than made up for them with a wealth of things to do however and whenever you wanted, or just completely ignore. New Vegas, on the other hand, ultimately feels empty and a bit dull despite all its strengths. It has the better story, but when that story is all there really is too do in the huge world they’ve provided, who cares?

I like Fallout: New Vegas a lot, but I haven’t finished it. Instead, I went on to play Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a game with a much better handle on what it means to create a world you want to get lost in, and from there to DC Universe Online, where I can hang out with Batman and explore made-up cities I’ve read about for most of my life.. I love open-world games – I have well over a dozen of the things, all lined up under my TV like the Magrathean Spring Catalog – but I love them for their potential for depth and variety, not the size of the world or even their main plot. I want playgrounds, not guided tours, and while Bethsoft’s inevitable return to Fallout is guaranteed to have a an enormous epic plot line, I can also trust them to give me plenty of things to do instead.

So no, not so much surprising, but strange. I’ve always had a special affection for Guitar Hero, even though I left the series after the second entry to follow Harmonix to the vastly superior Rock Band games. The first Guitar Hero game was released in my first year at a game designer, and it’s funny to me, given how huge and commonplace the games went on to be, to remember trying to explain to my bosses at Pop & Co. about this thing I’d read about where you played songs with a plastic guitar, and how we should get a copy for the office. After reading Kieron Gillen’s excellent “More Than a Feeling” piece for the Escapist about Boston-as-level design savants, I knew I needed to try the thing, and my love for the series was instant and pure. It was just such a good idea: a music game lovingly built by a bunch of musicians-turned-developers for everybody else that somehow emulated the feeling (if not the actual practice) of not only playing guitar, but doing so in front of a packed house of screaming fans. It was fun and funny, something you played with and against friends, passing the controller around to see who could come closest to perfection or at least fail most spectacularly. There are songs I hadn’t given a second thought to until Guitar Hero opened up them up and labeled their vitals with colored gems – I still can’t hear Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take Me Out’ without seeing button presses scrolling down the screen.

Beyond the fun I had playing it, Guitar Hero was a large part of shaping my thinking as a game designer so early on. Beyond the friendly difficulty levels and helpful tutorials (which Harmonix would only improve upon over time), there was the effect the game had on the majority of those who played it – I know several people and have read about more who picked up actual instruments for the first time because of the games, or dug guitars and drum kits out of storage for the first time in years after a night spent with friends and a toy instrument. It was the first time I’d ever seen a videogame have that sort of effect on someone, to take it beyond the satisfaction of a high score or difficult challenge mastered and actually encourage players to try something new with their lives.

(Which isn’t to say Guitar Hero was met with universal admiration. Some people just don’t like or don’t get rhythm games, and others could never get past the perceived embarrassment of mashing colored buttons on a kid-size guitar. And then of course there are the more tedious detractors, people who are often actual musicians themselves whose response to the game inevitably boils down to “why don’t you play a real guitar and quit wasting your time?” To which I’ve always asked, “why don’t you rescue a real princess?”)

I’m not sad the Guitar Hero franchise is shelved for the foreseeable future – the first installment after Activision completely took it over struck me as hollow and joyless, a feeling that only grew as endless sequels and installments follow, and in many ways it feels like a mercy killing. Any and all bad feelings I have are for the developers, many of whom are now or will be unemployed as Activision shutters their studios and throws them to the mercy of a desolate job market with little to no interest in music games requiring special controllers. I honestly don’t know how anyone works for an Activision studio without constantly picturing CEO Bobby Kotick hovering overhead with an axe twenty-four hours a day.

So Guitar Hero is gone, at least for the time being, and other than the lives directly impacted by its mothballing, I don’t really mind at all. As far as the series drifted from its roots (there’s an entire other post or two that could be written about how Harmonix perfected and built upon what they knew worked while Activision tacked on boss fights, mini-games, and any other mechanic they could find to keep things fresh), none of the lesser titles bearing the name can tarnish the love I had for those first two games or how much fun they still are to take for a spin. Guitar Hero was a big part of shaping my approach to game design, and then as now, when I’m again trying to figure out what’s most important to me as a designer, I’m grateful for all the fun I had with it and its lasting influence.

- A game where your environment is made up almost entirely of loose dirt and rocks, like the bottom of a mine shaft after a cave-in. To climb up and out, you have to use a device (some sort of special McGuffin, doesn’t really matter) to knock out the dirt above you so that it falls to the ground, forming piles and small hills you can scale. Environmental hazards (pockets of gas, underground rivers, etc.) exist to avoid, as well as lost treasures and other survivors to rescue if you want. (2D side-scroller perspective?)

- A top-down shoot-em-up, using magnetic charges instead of bullets. Player ship fires energy pulses that positively or negatively charge enemies and environmental objects, causing them to be smash together or repel each other violently. Ideally, parts of the environment can be wrenched out of the walls on the left and right sides of the screen by magnetic pull to go flying at enemies.

- A game for multiple (ideally younger) players where one player serves as a nuturer for the others, helping (and possibly hindering) them as they progress through the game world. A negative feedback loop personified, keeping the field more or less even and frustrations low, while including the potential for a very different experience each play session depending on who is in the nuturer position. Ideally, the game needs to fulfill this statement from a friend of mine’s seven-year-old daughter:

Sometimes my friends get upset when they lose at games. And it’s not fun anymore. So when I play with them I let them win. It’s still fun for me, though, because I like a challenge. And it’s just as challenging to make someone else win as it is to make yourself win.

Obviously presents huge balancing challenges, but not impossible.

I work for Powerhead Games, one of the precious few developers of console games in New York City. The company has been around since about 2000, and is based on the very edge of Chelsea on what used to be Tinpan Alley. It’s now the place to get counterfeit clothes and purses or to see a firetruck every day around 5 p.m. The company specializes in games aimed at young girls, and has created a wide variety of successful titles for the Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, and DS systems that do just that. I was brought on last March as a freelance producer for CSI, a port of a rather successful PC game from a few years ago. I was brought on full time in October, and when the offer was made I had no reservations at all – I love where I work, the people I work with are great, and I can’t think of a better place in the city to be making games. My official title is Producer, but since coming on full time I’ve done as much – if not more – game design as I did before. It’s a near-perfect blend of responsibilities for me, allowing me to create designs and then oversee their development over the course of the project. Before Powerhead, I had no idea where I wanted to go in games. Now I have a goal in mind, and that goal is named “Creative Director”, an ideal (for me, at least) blend of design and production responsibility. We’ll see.

CSI was a whole new world for me – I had handled some production chores for Flash games, overseeing a few months’ worth of development on a couple of titles, but nothing like seeing a console game from start to finish – the learning curve for a good long while was more like a right triangle, and every day brought something new to learn. That combined with an extremely short development schedule made for a trial by fire in every sense of the word, and it’s no exaggeration to say I wouldn’t have made it all without the help of my insanely talented team and an understanding boss. Like I said before, our game is a port, a version of a pre-existing game for a console other than the one it was originally created for. In CSI’s case, this meant taking a 1.5 GB game and squeezing it into less than a quarter of that space. The results were better than anybody could have hoped for – the amount of video in the game, the clarity of the text system, and the UI enhancements that appear in our version were mere pipe dreams at the beginning of the project. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that our DS game looks and plays better than the original PC version, which is something I’m extremely proud of. It was an intense project with more than a few very late nights, but I think the work we put in shows in the final version. Other people must think so too, as the game is doing rather well – currently it’s the sixteenth most-popular “Adventure” game on the DS, a category broad enough to include other point-and-click titles as well as the most recent Mario and Zelda titles, Pokemon, and a bunch of others. Yeah, it’s just a port of a game based on a kind of silly TV show. But it’s a goddamn good one, and my only regrets are the other improvements there weren’t time for. Maybe with the next one, yeah?

Currently, I’m working on a number of things I can’t talk about at all. So instead of talking about them, I’m probably going to start spending more time here thinking out loud about games from a number of different angles, including design, theory, culture, and anything that strikes my fancy. Games are my life, and while there’s a lot of talk already about them there aren’t a lot of discussions I’m very interested in participating in. So I thought I’d start some of my own.

In the meantime, CSI: Dark Motives for the Nintendo DS is out there on the internets and in stores, ready and waiting to keep you or the CSI fan in your life who has everything company this holiday season. Think of us as fight the good fight, both on tomorrow’s Black Friday and beyond.

First is Super Serif Brothers, which is exactly like Super Mario Bros. if there were only one of them and he were the letter “I” rather than a portly plumber with a tendency to dress as a racoon.

Pound signs (#) serve as the generic building blocks of levels, meaning anyting that isn’t a pound sign is special. Special characters can be used to navigate the level by serving as platforms, switches, exits, or things to collect. It’s simple fun, with some of the later levels getting pretty tricky. Miyamoto would be proud.

The real gem here, though, is the Level Pit, an ever-growing coloection of user created levels offering a vast array of challenges ranging from beginner to impossible. At the time of writing thre’s 3,556 of the things, all of which can be played for free. You can also play with the level editor (free and browser-based as well) if you fancy making and uploading your own. Like many other Flash games its simple appearance hides significant depth, and in this case the creators have managed to build a healthy and growing community around a simple browser game with no graphics and nearly limitless possibilities. Take note, MMOs: if you want your users to stay, give them the ability to make their own toys.

Next is Which Way Adventure, a choose-your-own-adventure game about nuclear annihilation, time travel, lady acrobats and manticores. Sometimes all at once.

Your options are truly limitless, provided you’ve ever wanted to destroy Western civilization, ride the rails as a hobo indefinitely, become a shoe cobbler’s apprentice, or be devoured by a manticore. In fact, no matter which way your journeys take you, odds are good you’ll wind up at the wrong end of said manticore, proving once again that art imitates life. Largely worksafe, depending on how your boss feels about crudely drawn cartoons of toppless circus women.

The reference here is only slightly less tenous than the Super Serif Brothers = Super Mario Bros. = Mario Galaxy one above. Tomorrow sees the commercial release of CSI: Dark Motives for the Nintendo DS, a port of the PC game from a few years ago of the same name that I produced. It might not seem like a lot, but this is kind of a huge thing – it’s a real thing in a real box on real store shelves, and it has my name in the credits section. I’ll talk more about it – and my actual job thing, which I just realized today I haven’t so much mentioned here before – over the next few days when I’m less about to pass out. In the meantime, if you or anybody you know are fans of the show or like playing detective in the style of the adventure games of yore, Dark Motives can be found at better videogame stores or via this handy Amazon link.

Gameplay is hard to describe outside of elaborate hand gestures and excited sounds. Stars are hidden in small glaxies scattered throughout the universe, and it’s up to you to go find them. Each galaxy has its own notion of how little things like gravity and physics work, and despite a few shared elements here and there no two bits are every truly the same. Travel to each galaxy and between planetoids is handled by launching Mario into space, where he swoops and spins like he was born to it. After playing through nearly a fifth of all the game offers (I started at 11:30 and just now looked up), there’s fair evidence that this is where he belonged all along.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful game. The visuals are the best the Wii’s seen yet, and while no one voice will ever silence the hardcore critics and their flabbergasted rage at Nintendo’s “for teh kiddies” approach to next-gen hardware, it should quiet more than its share of outcry. You really must play it to understand the heaps and mounds of praise it’s getting in the press, because nothing else will show you just how right they’ve gotten it. Mario Galaxy is a triumph from the word go, and the little bit I’ve seen so far has already provided some of my favorite game moments of the year. Now to go find some more.

SpongeBob’s Atlantis Squarepantis Squareoff – or SASS, as I will henceforth be calling it – was made by the good folks over at Pop&Co (now calling themselves This Is Pop). Pop gave me my first real job in games, (see also: Bible Fight), and they do some of the prettiest web and downloadable games work of anybody out there. I was around for a lot of the early work on SASS, including early design stuff, putting together the Game Design Document, and writing the script for the game. The script, much like the game itself, has changed a bit since I last saw it, but that’s only natural over the course of development. From the bit I’ve played of the final product it looks like more of my dumb jokes survived than probably should have, so I’m happy.

SASS is all about turn-based combat, with SpongeBob’s moves – that is, walking, attacking, defense, etc. – handled by cards you find along the way by defeating enemies, opening chests, winning mini-games, and smashing things. While you can only carry so many cards with you at a time, you can pick and choose which ones come along for the ride between each level, allowing you to try different combinations until your underwear is stuffed with an unbeatable arsenal. SASS’s story is about the villainous Plankton taking over the long lost city of Atlantis as part of his latest evil scheme to rule the ocean floor with an iron flagellum, and as SpongeBob it’s your job to stop him. The parallels to our nation’s own real-world woes are doubtlessly clear. There are something like fifty levels, loads of enemies, and gobs of cards to find and experiment with. There is also, if memory serves, a sea bear. The game is PC-only, so Mac users are out of luck, but it runs nicely via bootcamp if you’re down with that sort of thing.

I had moved on from Pop before the game was really in a playable state, so it’s really great to see the final result of everbody’s hard work for what is essentially the first time. Kudos, Pop peoples, on a job well done.

I can’t decide what I like more: that the moves he pulls in this clip – bouncing grenades off walls to kill an opponent, covering a doorway in mines – are all completely doable in the game itself, or the entire last minute of the video that had me laughing out loud at far too early this morning.

Embracing that, Valve are steadily releasing a series of trailers that each shine a light on a different character. There are only three so far, and with the game’s release right around the corner (next week, in fact), I’m scared to death there won’t be any more. Each character interview so far is a genuine delight, managing to turn the thrill of playing these classes into a tangible personality. It’s to the point that I can’t help but wonder how many role-playing enthusiasts will be drawn to the game – more so than any Halo 3 death match with a dozen differently colored Master Chiefs trying to kill each other, TF2 has gone out of its way to involve the player in every way possible, and that very much includes picking not just the character class you want to play as, but the character itself. I don’t know what character I’m going to end up as; the support classes of the Medic and Engineer are both very interesting, but so are the fleet-footed Scout and rampaging Demoman. But you can bet I’m going to put each through their paces before settling on one, and even then it’ll probably only be a matter of time before I leap to somebody else.

So here, for your viewing pleasure, are the first three introduction videos. As others appear I’ll probably throw them up as well. Even if you have no interest in the game you should go on and watch them, as they’re all very well put together and very, very funny. Particularly the Soldier and his unique interpretations of Sun Tzu.