Thursday, January 31st, 2008
I was about to call this post “Game 2″ when I realised that the name was COVERTLY ANNOUNCED by my esteemed colleague last night. Frozen Synapse is the next game from Mode 7. It’s a dual-platform DS and PC release (probably PSP too), and it’s going to absolutely blow you away. It’s been on the drawing board for 15 months, and has been being prototyped for about 5 weeks.
And, in what I’m going to call a fairly shocking development, I was able to give my esteemed colleague a test level to actually play today. Obviously very early, but having the core gameplay existing is pretty damn exciting and beats the TWO YEARS it took for Determinance to get to anywhere near a form recognisable as a game.
You guys will be hearing a lot more about it soon. I can reveal that FS is a 2D game… that’s all you’re getting for now.
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Thursday, January 31st, 2008
My esteemed colleague, while reading a postmortem on the X Files game, found this choice titbit in the “what went wrong” section:
4. The Password Puzzle
One of the first puzzles that the user was confronted with in the game was the infamous password puzzle. The FBI computer that the player used in the game (as Craig Willmore, FBI agent) was password protected. To enter the computer, the player needed to discover the character’s full name and his password. The password was ‘Shiloh’ (for those of you who intend on playing the game, write this down 
, a famous civil-war battle. Willmore, being a civil war nut, had posted a map of the battle on the bulletin board of his office. The player was to learn that Willmore liked the civil war, see the map on the bulletin board, and thus make the connection with the password.
Players and reviewers alike complained that an FBI agent should know his own password. Issues of game logic aside, the puzzle was difficult at best, and in actual game-play it had the effect of shutting uninquisitive players out of their computer, and stumping players in the first sequence of the game. A week after the game’s release, Fox Interactive had posted the password in big bold letters on their X-Files tech-support web page to help stem the tide of support calls they were getting about it.
There were many attempts made by several developers throughout development to get this puzzle removed from the game. These attempts were met with heavy resistance from the designers, and the decision was made to keep it in.
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Thursday, January 31st, 2008
I think it’s time to tell the world that we have now been approved by Nintendo, and we are currently looking at two (well two and a fantasy, making three) different projects for Nintendo systems.
We decided to release this information through Gamespot as they have been good to us in the past, carrying news about us when we were still an indie speck. I consider us now to be an indie blot. There will be a couple of interviews with us soon where we’ll give a bit more detail.
I really think our DS strategy title is going to blow everything out of the water. Delay is banging on about how Subversion is ‘troversion’s masterpiece, and so it might be, but Frozen Synapse is going to be ours.
Oops. Spoilers.
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Sunday, January 27th, 2008
I’ve always been a huge DS supporter, but my recent purchase of a PSP has shown me something new. The DS is about a different kind of gaming – puzzle games and very toned, polished games. The PSP is about full-on, ambitious, wonky, flawed, interesting gaming.
It’s been eight years since I was last able to play TV console games. I find the experience trapping – I feel like I have to sit down and engage. As anyone who knows me will attest I have a physical need to wonder around, come and go, leave and return at any point. Console games need me to be there with them too consistantly.
I’m not sure why I don’t feel the same about PC games – maybe it’s because a PC’s default state is “on” while a TV’s is “off”, and thus an activated TV feels pressurising.
I love portable gaming for two reasons. The first is that I can play while in a room with people drinking and watching TV; chatting and laughing while having the left hand side of my brain amused by play. It’s my definition of “sociable gaming”. The second is that it doesn’t trap me like console gaming does. I can pause it or sleep it at any time. It feels like a book – it can be consumed at any pace.
But I’ve been massively let down by the DS’ back catalogue so far. It’s not an objective critiscm – the DS just doesn’t have the kind of games I like. I like games that aren’t polished, where you feel almost like you’re in a Soviet city where things don’t quite work properly but nevertheless you may turn a corner to find the most fantastic adventure
; where at the very least you will find many bizzarre and amusing failures. That is gaming as an art form to me. Polish is not the antithesis of the gaming I like, but it is the most regular symptom of the gaming I find truly boring.
The PSP and it’s back catlogue have given me that experience, and on a device which lets me feel happy to just experience. Great stuff.
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