GDC 2007, Day 1

Game Developer's Conference, Day 1. (Well, I suppose it's technically day 3, but I like to call wednesday the first day of the event.)

In a session about protecting your IP, the speaker (a patent lawyer) mentioned offhandedly that patents are great to protect new game mechanics. The ghost of Thomas Jefferson was in attendance and he shed a single tear. (Related link.)

Sony unveiled its now Home thing for PS3. This is to be part of the PS3's OS and lets you create a (realistic) avatar and wander around a shared space where you can talk to other players, and also set up and decorate your own room, which is private to you and any friends you invite over. The graphics look really nice, and the whole thing is pretty cool, if you are joe gamer.

If you are me, you have a lot of questions. Why does every piece of software have too much loading time? (Why does God of War, also by Sony, have the least loading time of any disc-based game ever?) Do I have even the semblance of free speech in the shared areas? All the media I can download is wrapped in DRM and even if I *buy* it, I can't play it on any other platforms (including pc, ipod, etc), right? Why do I need a forum to communicate where I don't have free speech and I do have heavy DRM restrictions? Especially when it's restricted to only hanging out with other PS3 owners. Btw, Second Life was already made, and it's free, and you have rights. (Though I will say again: Sony's Home does have significantly better graphics than Second Life).

Warren Spector gave his talk about story games. I would really like to talk to Warren about this stuff as I like the area he's trying to explore. He wants to make story games that don't tell a linear story (God of War, every other game ever) yet don't give ALL the control over to the player (The Sims, Spore), but instead search out a middle ground. To use a simple, stupid example, he wants to give you the motivation and drama for *why* you want to go through that door, but all the expressive gameplay options that let you choose how you will do it. The more physics-based stuff behind this the better. That example is maybe too simple though, as he also emphasized he wants to give you real choices, not just a game on rails, so perhaps he'd throw in another door or two as well. ;)

Warren, if you stumble across this, I think very highly of you. I have these minor criticisms, though. First, the slides in your talk are really horrible and you know it, lol. Maybe rethink that huge red font with a white drop shadow. Second, you are too obsessed with story, and you know it. There is nothing wrong with making the kinds of games you talked about. Almost no one is making them the way you describe, and you really are leading that charge, which is great. But there is a lot of merit to games that have no story at all and there always will be. I learned a lot from playing competitive games, and I'll tell you right now, "story"--the kind created by an author--had nothing to do with any of that. Tetris, electroplankton, The Sims, Virtua Fighter, Mario Kart, and Tony Hawk are all examples of games (and non-games) that are not *about* stories at all, nor should they be.

That said, Warren showed a quote from Susan Sontag (that I can't find right now, ugh) where she said that a writer a really a student and judge of morality who expresses this through story. I happen to agree, which is why I have newfound interest in story games, if only they could shed their archaic trappings.

A lot of crazy things were shown in the experimental gameplay workshop. Too much to explain, and even if I did, some stuff is weird enough that it would take too many words to describe. I'll quickly mention that one person showed a quick game that simulates game development. This development is done by a legion of tiny slave-creatures who work in an old, broken down warehouse. You can click on them to kill the slower ones so the rest work faster. A dialog box asks if you want to try an innovative idea from one of the lower slaves, and the audience all yelled "no!" and laughed. So he didn't let the slave use his idea, and he killed more of the slower ones. But then some slaves stopped working and held up anarchy symbols.

Then the presenter showed a screen of options the player can set such as how much graphics vs. gameplay vs. marketing he wants to have. If you set gameplay to 100%, then the other two quantities go to zero, and so do sales. There are also other various settings, such as the wage of a slave, which defaults to $3. Anyway, he clicked on more slaves to kill them, but then he got the entire rest of them to stop work. The game popped up a message saying that no further work can be done because the slaves revolted. He can either cancel the game or ship it as-is. He decided to ship it. Then we saw the results screen showing 201% ROI (return on investment) and pretty good sales, but all the slaves died.

This game is really quite something, because when a game actually SAYS something--I mean anything--it's like water in your face. Games don't usually have much of anything to say. A game like this clearly could not be made inside the normal game industry, which again demonstrates how important it is to have any indie voice.

In a *very* packed session about MMOs, we have panelists Raph Koster, Rob Pardo, Mark Kern, Daniel James, and a couple others. They all had really good comments about where the genre is going, how to compete with WoW and how not to compete with it, and how large the genre really is, even without WoW being counted at all.

At one point, Daniel James (Puzzle Pirates, Bang! Howdy) said something close to "I'm not sure if I should move my company offshore now, or in a few years. Who knows what the US government will say about any MMO such as mine...will they say my players are gambling? That they are engaging in virtual sex that they don't like? Or some other ill-informed thing? I probably need to move my game to a jurisdiction that is more into the idea that people can do whatever they want than America."

OUCH! Our founding fathers just rolled over in their graves, because that country was supposed to be America. I don't doubt anything James is saying though, and he went as far as to say that the innovations in MMOs (and he didn't mean MMOs that look anything like WoW) will not come from the US, because our regulations are not conducive to, well, freedom.

Raph Koster repeatedly made just about everyone in the room feel dumb by rattling off subscriber numbers about 9 different times for a bunch of MMOs no one in the room had heard of. He listed a couple that he said had higher subscribers numbers in north america than World of Warcraft. Many of these are web based. Many are originally from countries outside the US. Many are not even for gamers, and a couple are for kids. He reminded all of us over and over that our perceptions are way off, because the mainstream gaming press doesn't cover these games, but they DO have the numbers and small budget MMOs are taking off...and it's not the ones being sold in retail stores.

The Game Developer Choice Awards had better production values than ever this year. Huge, huge thank you to Tim Schaefer for doing part of the presenting. Tim showed us all how much impact and humor you can get out of just a few words between awards. He obviously wrote his own lines and has great comic timing in delivery. It almost makes up for the first 15 minutes of Psychonauts. Thanks Tim!

The Lifetime Achievement Award went to Shigeru Miyamoto, who was actually there to accept it (he speaks tomorrow). I felt genuine happiness to share the honor of giving him a standing ovation. He said that the name of the award seems to imply that we think he's done making games. He then said that he hopes to keep doing this for a very, very long time. The crowd gave thunderous applause.

Ok, that's enough summary for now.

--Sirlin

Time and Skill from Scientific American

When I wrote that opinion piece for gamasutra about World of Warcraft, I listed that "time = skill" was one of the "wrong" lessons of the game (or any rpg, even). I can understand someone debating whether that lesson is really taught or not, but it never even occurred to me that hundreds and hundreds of people on many messege boards would say, "time really is skill, because you need to spend a lot of time on anything to get good at it."

Oh my. I'm telling you otherwise, and so is Scientific American:
The Expert Mind article

It's possible to spend a very long time at something and still not be good at it. It's also possible to spend a short time on something and be extremely good at it. This is especially true in a competitive game (where you can bring the lessons of other competitive games with you into the new one) and it's double-triple true in an MMO, where mastery of pvp has little-to-no connection to the 400 hour grind to level 60. The 400 hours of leveling up doesn't convert your time into skill; it's simply a way to gate your progress so rpg's take a long time. Replacing actual skill with your character's simulated increase in "fake-skill" makes rpg's accessible to anyone (anyone with lots of time, that is).

Philip Ross's Scientific American article also explores the idea that "effortful study" is what really makes you improve at something. That's why people who practice something a few years (such as chess, but I think it's true of many skills) can overtake someone who has been "grinding" away at it for 10 or 20 years.

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Measuring actual merit, rather than purely time invested, is a nice thing to do in the real world and in games. The trouble is, developing mastery in something is hard and not for everyone, so simply rewarding time allows a game to offer "easy fun" and be enjoyed a wider audience. I wonder, though, if we could devise some new rpg mechanics that better reflected what learning things is actually like in the real world without restricting our audience to hardcore gamers. Spending time would count for nothing, but actually accomplishing things would. The closest thing I can think of to this is the Zelda series of games. These games are somewhat like RPGs in that they have a story, lots of characters to talk to, etc. And yet you have no XP bar or level, you don't grind monsters, and you only get things when you actually complete a quest or defeat a boss in a dungeon or whatever. A game like Zelda could be adjusted to have a stronger emphasis on story (imagine the rich and varied storyweaving in Oblivion) without resorting to leveling-up mechanics.

Anyone else have any ideas for how to do a story based rpg that is accessible to a wide range of people, does not use grinding or leveling at all, and is still actually fun? Getting rid of the addiction cycle of "kill monster, get +2 sword, kill better monster, get better item" is a tough one, becuase it's such a powerful system. But it would be nice if we had a story based game that *wasn't* based on increasing the "fake-skill" of your character by attacking the same monster 1,000 times. (Again, see the Scientific American article for how people actually increase their skill in things.)

Another sad note for me, apparently the game industry isn't about just putting in time, either. I've been at it a lot longer than a) the combat designers on God of War, b) Jenova Chen, who made the game Flow and now has a 3 game deal with Sony, c) a friend who's now an executive at Capcom, and d) another friend who's now a manager at Xbox Live Arcade. All of those people are doing great things and deserve every bit of their success. It seems that I made a wrong series of decisions or a wrong turn somewhere along the way though, as I still have little to show for all my grinding.

--Sirlin

Games With a Purpose

Games teach things and/or make statements, whether they mean to or not. If you have 51 minutes of spare time, you can see Carnegie Mellon's Luis von Ahn talk about games he designed to specifically solve problems. He's interested in using "human computing cycles" (time that people "waste" playing games) to solve problems (such as labeling objects in images) that computers are not yet good at solving.

I hope this video is somewhat embarrassing to the entire game industry, as it took someone outside of the usual sphere of game-making to demonstrate the extreme power of games, and that they can be used for useful purposes. The games presented in the video are simple (and probably fun), but it's more about the radical shift in thinking about what a game could be used for that is notable.

(Thanks to Eric Williams for telling me about this in the first place, even though I'm now 8 months late to the party. Or three years late, if we count the release of the first game mentioned in the talk.)

This whole thing reminds me of a lecture given by 42 Entertainment, makers of the "i love bees" alternate reality game that surrounded the release of Halo 2 and "The Beast" AR game surrounding the release of the movie A.I.. Anyway, they also talked about how they could give out extremely difficult puzzles/problems, all of which would be solved nearly instantly by the hive mind of the world. They even started giving out problems to which they did not know how to find solutions, and even these were solved by the vast network of connected minds, organized across various chat rooms and forums.

Someone from 42 joked, "If we made a game that focused all this brainpower on solving world hunger, we'd have it solved in two days, tops."

Everyone laughed.
Except me.

--Sirlin

Sirlin's 2006 Game Awards

Giving out truly unbiased and thoughtful awards is a lot of work and requires a lot of research. It also yields pretty predictable, boring results, so that's why my awards are totally biased and generally unfair. Also, don't you hate it when award stuff starts counting up from like the top 100 when you just want to know the #1 winner? Me too, let's start with that.

Best Game of 2006

Tie: World of Warcraft TCG and Magic: The Gathering

World of Warcraft TCG is a design masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. I tried for years to design a card game with a system as good as MTG, but with streamlined design choices and reduced chance of "mana screw." I was on a very similar track to what WoW TCG turned out to be. They made good choices, have good art, good flavor, and good card layout. The concept of special multi-player-only addons like the Onyxia Raid Deck is also great. The only thing WoW TCG really lacks right now is card pool deep enough to support really interesting decks, but that will come with time.

Magic: The Gathering has probably been the best designed game around for many years. Back in 2005, players had to contend with the overpowered Affinity decks and that damned Scullclamp card, but Ravincia and this year's Timespiral are a refreshing change. I especially like the idea of a block where each of the three sets are "past, present, and future," and the idea of reprinting 121 "timeshifted" (aka, greatest hits cards from the past) was an excellent one. Thank Mark Rosewater for that, great job.

It's kind of ironic that MTG is hitting a high-point by printing a block with so many old cards. This practice is an attempt to make a "good game, rather than a new game," but the ironic part is that the "oldness" of the set is the newness. Wrap your mind around that.

It's also interesting to note that neither of this year's winning games is a video game (yes, I know about mtg online, but that's not the point). It goes to show that while card games are focusing on excellent rule design, so many video games are focusing on boring mechanics like testing your ability to aim a cross-hair on a 2d plane. What a joke. (A pretty version of the "aim the cross-hairs game," Gears of War, does not appear anywhere in these awards.)

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend that you play either of the two winning games. Both are "trading card games" which means they use the rip-off scheme of selling you cards in random packs to limit your ability to make whatever deck you want. If you want a constructed, tournament-quality deck in either game, the market value is about $300. Yes, it's possible to somehow play a specific or semi-weird deck that's cheaper, but $300 is about the cost of most tournament-level decks in both games. This is absolutely ludicrous, and you should not support this system. You should instead support my upcoming card game (not to be confused with my upcoming Street Fighter-type card game or my upcoming Pokemon-style card game for Kongregate.com). This new card game will take me a year or two to get anywhere with, but it will NOT use the same rip-off marketing scheme of TCGs and yet it will contain the fun style of mechanics that those games offer.

2nd Best Game of 2006: Resident Evil 4 (PlayStation 2)

You might be saying, "Hey, RE4 didn't even come out in 2006, so it shouldn't be able to win this award," and you'd have a good point. But consider a few things. First, RE4 did not win the Game Developer Conference's award for best game of 2005. In fact, it wasn't even NOMINATED for any award. Instead, Shadow of the Colossus swept just about everything. (Shadow of the Framerate, I call it.)

Shadow of the Colossus should have won these awards:

• Best Brave Attempt at Something that Didn't Pan Out
• Worst Framerate of the Year
• Worst Controls of a Horse, Ever

I usually give the Game Developer's Choice Awards a special significance because awards by game developers for game developers tend to be a little more thoughtful and less political than the rest, but the lack of RE4 to even be nominated last year really took credibility away from the entire affair. Tommy Tallarico's immature jokes while hosting the event didn't help either (why is he allowed to represent the game industry again?)

I remember seeing David Jaffe accept an award somewhere last year (I forget from where) for God of War winning game of the year. God of War is totally awesome and is my second favorite game last year after RE4, but even Jaffe mentioned that he probably only won because RE4 was not allowed into that award process due to a technicality. Well, it just so happens that a reverse-technicality made RE4 eligible for my awards this year, so it wins the #2 spot.

I would tell you about why this game deserves this spot, but I've gone on too long about all this other hoopla, so you'll just have to play it yourself to find out.

3rd Best Game of 2006: Metroid Pinball (Nintendo DS)

I've threatened all year to give this game my #1 game of the year award, but I guess it ended up in 3rd place. This is the most underrated game of the year. It's basically the best possible game of pinball I could even imagine. You fight bosses, you get weapon upgrades, and you play several mini-games that even let you transform into Sammus and shoot alien bugs. Best of all, your mission is to collect 12 artifact pieces as you teleport back and forth between 4 or 5 different pinball boards, plus a final-boss board. How cool is that? It even has a neat little multiplayer mode where you race get a certain score, and if you lose your ball, your points are reduced to equal your enemy's points, if you were winning (that keeps things close, usually!).

Metroid Prime pinball is, for me, the perfect pick-up-and-play DS game. I don't have to remember where I was in some huge story or map, or how this or that mechanic worked. I can just play for a few minutes, or for an hour if I want to try to get all 12 artifacts. Oh, and once you do that, you unlock a harder difficulty for the whole game. What's not to like about this?

4th Best Game of the Year: Wii Sports

My sister and my *mom* play this. Dear Nintendo: mission accomplished, you win.

5th Best Game of the Year:

This is a close one, but I'll say Cooking Mama (Nintendo DS). Lots of DS games are some form of "here's a bunch of touch screen activities" but Cooking Mama manages to give a coherent wrapper to whole deal. It's easy to get into, yet offers some challenge if you want the gold medals, and there's lots of different stuff to cook. I'm sure this is an overlooked game, but it's great.

Let's mix things up a bit.

Best Game Consoles of the Year:

1. Nintendo DS
2. Nintendo Wii
3. No console was good enough for #3.
4. Microsoft Xbox 360

The Nintendo DS has like 20 amazing games right now and easily takes the top spot for consoles this year. Remember when everyone hated the DS when it first came out? Two screens, who needs that? Touch screen is a gimmick. Yeah, everyone was wrong.

The Nintendo Wii is fun and great so far and very consistent with Nintendo's goals. Because it doesn't have that many good games yet, it doesn't quite deserve #1. Thank you Nintendo for supporting innovation over graphics and for keeping the costs of game development low so developers can take risks rather than just making more cookie-cutter games.

The Xbox 360 is solid and good. Good graphics, good processing power, and a pretty good game library at this point. The real high-point of the console is, of course, Xbox Live. This online service blows the rivals out of the water. It's so easy to play any Xbox 360 game online (and to voice chat) thanks to the fairly standard interface and online features Microsoft enforces on all online games.

Xbox Live Arcade is also an amazing, awesome thing for our industry. I totally love it and have personally bought and enjoyed several Live Arcade games. I really hope Microsoft continues to open the doors for amateur game developers to create game games for it using the XNA platform. Current game companies are certainly not where all of tomorrow's innovations will come from. I see MS's first steps toward cultivating the hobbyists and I'm very happy.

HOWEVER, you'll notice that the Xbox 360 somehow managed to lose out the #3 spot this year to, well, a blank entry. That's because the 360 was supposed to usher in the "HD era" and the damn thing doesn't have DVI or HDMI support at all. What an absolute embarrassing joke that is. Do you know WHY it doesn't have these things? It's because of DRM bullshit. Media companies are so paranoid that you will pirate their content that we're mired in this mess of next-gen video connections having DHCP to make sure you're watching a licensed signal. If content creators turn on the ICT bit, then you have to watch the signal at 1/4th the resolution through component cables or any non-DRM's interface. You can read this for more info.

The fake "good news" is that apparently Microsoft and other big companies have made deals so that the ICT bit will not be turned on by content providers for at least a few years. So you will be able to watch HD content through (crappy) component cables without getting the 1/4th resolution thing happening. But what you won't get is a DVI or HDMI cable for you Xbox 360 because Microsoft is too afraid of piracy. DRM politics yet again make a piece of technology Defective By Design.

Speaking of Microsoft and products that are Defective By Design because of DRm, check out Leo Laporte's, um, passionate rant about how the Microsoft Zune is the straw that broke the camel's back. It's a device so cripled by DRM issues that he thinks the music industry will finally lose this battle.

Hey, music and movie industries, I have a sidenote for you. In 2007, I am going to go full gear into pirating your content because your bullshit about DRM has caused so many crippling problems that I can't take you seriously anymore. If you want me to buy stuff again, it's really simple, I'll tell you exactly how. When a new movie or tv show comes out, give me the ability to buy it legally from you. When I buy it, give me unlimited download rights forever to download that show in any resolution I want, with no DRM. If you do this, I will gladly stop all pirating activities. I won't have to worry about torrents being seeded, about getting viruses, or about DRM. I will have no reason left to get content from anyone other than you. Offering a better product (the one I just described) is a better solution than gimping your own product and threatening legal action if people want the ungimped version. Figure it out.

Sony is such a DRM-obsessed dinosaur, I don't even know where to begin with them.

How about some more awards?

Worst Save System of the Year: Dead Rising (Xbox 360)

Dead Rising is great in all sorts of ways, but it's hell-bent on ruining my fun with it's hardcore save system. When you die, you get a confusing message about how if you want to keep your stats, you have to start over. Well, I wanted to keep my stats, so I clicked that one, and I had to start over THE ENTIRE GAME, from the opening movie, on. I was suckered into doing this one or two more times, until I finally decided to just press on. By pressing on, I mean that when I died, I have to "restore game" from my last save point, which might have been hours ago if I forgot to save recently. You can't save anywhere you know, you have to actually go to a save point.

Dead Rising is, on the one hand, a "sand box game" that lets you just explore and do whatever you want (there's plenty to do!) and yet it is also a weak-sauce attempt at some form of Groundhog Day game where I have to keep starting over to get the perfect run, or give up on that but have to keep restoring from save points. What is this, 1980? This excellent game is ruined by overly punishing save system. I have better things to do with my time than put up with that.

2nd Worst Save System of the Year: New Super Mario Brothers (Nintendo DS)

Wow, what were they thinking? You can't save anytime you want, even though this game is on a handheld console. You know, the pick-up-and-play console where you might want to change games often. You have to either get to the next castle or mini-castle to save, or spend some hard-earned special coins to open a mushroom house to save (I totally don't want to spend coins on that).

Here's a thought. Let me save anytime I want. When I save, you don't have to save my exact position in a level (the hardcores would complain there's no challenge). Instead, just save a list of which levels I've completed and which special coins I have, that's it. Then let me turn the DS off so my girlfriend can play Nintendogs or Animal Crossing.

The most insulting thing here is that when you beat the game, you earn THE ABILITY TO SAVE on anytime on the world-map. Wow, so they had the sane-save system the whole time and only give it to me after I beat the entire game, nice. It's not like the save system you unlock makes the game overly easy or anything. The game in general gives you tons of extra lives for no apparent reason anyway.

It is, in my opinion, the highest arrogance of a game designer to think that the precious needs of his game outrank the real-life needs of the player to turn off the game and have some reasonable way to save (most of) his progress immediately.

Two games that did an unusually good job of balancing "always let the player save" with "keep some challenge" are Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Nintendo DS) and Fire Emblem (GBA). In C:DoS, there are save points scattered around the map, like in many games. So you could keep playing until you reach one, then turn the game off. BUT, you can also pause the game at any time and create a "save marker." If you do, the game goes back to the title screen. The next time you load that save marker, the marker will be destroyed. The result is that anytime you want to stop playing, you can create a save marker instantly, then turn the thing off. You can resume from exactly that point. But saving right before the hard part doesn't help, because you can't go back to that save point more than one time.

Fire Emblem does something similar. You don't need to actively create a save marker though, you can just turn the game off anytime you want, it will automatically resume from exactly that point. I don't mean put it in sleep mode by the way, I mean turn it off and take it out of the console. Again, you can use the in-game system of save check-points, or you can create a save marker automatically turning the game off, but you can't return to that marked point more than once.

These games pass. They thought about accommodating the player, and they made some reasonable design decisions. Dead Rising and N:SMB should stand as examples of exactly what not to do.

Most Overplayed Fighting Games of the Last 10 Years:

Tekken Series and Street Fighter 3 Series

As for Tekken, Virtua Fighter is deeper and Soul Calibur has better, easier controls. Tekken is in a weird middleground that I don't understand. As for SF3:3rd Strike, it's overly floppy animation, total lack of focus on controlling space (parries ruin the positional games common in fighting games), and generally simplistic engine make it a bottom-of-the-barrel offering. Try one of the games below, instead:

Best Fighting Game of the Last 10 Years:

Guilty Gear XX: Slash (Japanese PS2 Import)

Often, retrospective awards take into account how much of a breakthrough a game was at the time. My award is meant this way: If, *today* you have every fighting from the last 10 years in front of you, which should you actually play?

The Guilty Gear series has combined the best features from the genre's history into an excellent overall game. Nice art, most varied set of characters in any fighting game (far more varied than any 3d fighting game), and great, great mechanics. Yeah Ky is too good or whatever, but oh well. This is a masterpiece of fighting game design and deserves your attention if you have any interest in the genre at all.

2nd Best Fighting Game of the Last 10 Years:

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (playable on Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 on PS2 and Xbox)

This game is much simpler than Guilty Gear, but there's something about it that holds up. It's still played in tournaments today, including the Evolution Fighting Game Series (www.evo2k.com). You can even check out my 30 minute video tutorial on this game, in the post before this one.

You can seriously still be reading this, so I'll end now. Congratulations to all the winners and losers.

--Sirlin

Update on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 8:40PM by Sirlin

Gears of War

I meant to post this weeks ago, but after some of you told me to take a second look at Gears of War, I did. My first impression of the game as "just another pretty shooter" was not fair. As a single player game, it has a remarkble similarity to Resident Evil 4 (a good thing).

• In both games, there is no reticule by default and left/right on the analog stick is for movement.
• In both games, you hold a shift button to bring up the reticule.
• Both games are 3rd person, not first person (yay).
• In both games, you can perform context sensitive moves when close to objects, just as opening a door by pressing X.
• Both games rise above their shooter mechanics by putting the player in a long seires of carefully designed situations/mini-missions.

Gears of War also has a multiplayer game, which is "Counter-Strike without objectives." I personally like the format and found multiplayer to be pretty fun at my low level of skill, but I suck at it, so what do I really know. One thing I found strange was that the successful players seemed to hardly ever really fight at mid-range, and instead just dive around until they can shotgun you (or sometimes melee you) at close range. It seems like the designers intended more mid-range cover battles, but it either didn't turn out that way or my view is skewed or something.

I never disputed Gears of War's great presentation, so I probably should have given it "Best Production Values of 2006" at the least. Given it's presentation, solid controls, good mission design, and pretty good multiplayer, I think it probably deserved to be somewhere in the top 5 of my overall list--not as high as Resident Evil 4, but perhaps a bit above Cooking Mana DS. ;)

CliffyB: impressive job as always. Please make an update to Unreal Championship 2 where melee is just as good, but with even more lock-on abilities to reduce the importance of aiming. Thanks.

--Sirlin

Capcom Classics Codes

Here's my holiday gift to all of you.

In Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 1, you can unlock everything in the game by entering this code on the title screen:

PS2 version: L1, R1, Up on right analog stick, Down on right analog stick, L1, R1, Up on left analog stick, Down on left analog stick, L1, R1, Up on d-pad, Down on d-pad.

Xbox version: L-trigger, R-trigger, Up on right analog stick, Down on right analog stick, L-trigger, R-trigger, Up on left analog stick, Down on left analog stick, L-trigger, R-trigger, Up on d-pad, Down on d-pad.

In Capcom Classics Collection: Remixed, you can unlock everything in the game by entering this code on the title screen:

PSP version: Left on d-pad, Right on d-pad, Left on analog stick, Right on analog stick, Square, Circle, Up on d-pad, Down on d-pad

In Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2, you can unlock everything in the game by entering this code on the title screen:

PS2 version: Left on d-pad, Right on d-pad, Up on d-pad, Down on d-pad, L1, R1, L1, R1

Xbox version: Left on d-pad, Right on d-pad, Up on d-pad, Down on d-pad, L-trigger, R-trigger, L-trigger, R-trigger

And finally, in Capcom Classics Collection: Remixed (PSP), there is a secret game sharing feature. We didn't have time to go through the official paperwork and testing needed in order to claim the game supports game sharing, but we put the feature in anyway, probably in a better form than how you're supposed to do it. Here's how it works:

Launch any game from the main menu of CCC: Remixed. Take out the game disc. The game you launched should keep playing with no known problems. Give the game disc to your friend. Your friend can now play any game he wants, but have him launch the same game you did. Now you can "join game" and play a wireless multiplayer game with your friend, using a total of only one disc. Interesting to note that this implementation of game sharing required no interface screens at all: it "just works."

Speaking of holiday gifts, you could still order my Playing to Win book in time for the holidays, either for yourself or your gaming friends.

--Sirlin