That's really clever. Nice work!

Not getting enough sleep + skipping breakfast to make it to class + Feet hurting like hell, more so than the past several months + all these darn flickering dots in front of my eyes I can't get rid of = not happy.

Pikmin, Luigi's Mansion, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Kirby Air Ride, Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat. I'll letcha know if I remember any other good ones.

I'm watching my friend play through The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and it's got me thinking about boss battles. The Zelda series has established a pretty classic formula for boss fights:

Attack Pattern A- Pause, allow for strike- After 3 times, move on to Pattern B, C, etc.

These boss battles are usually in an enclosed arena, with two or three planes at most.

What I'm interested in, is what boss battles have you seen that break the mold from typical videogame fights? What ideas would you like to see?

Actually, one could argue LOVE did it too, through some fancy extra filters. The game mentioned above looks quite nice.

Didn't Bastion have a style similar to this? Either way, it looks awesome.

On that note, I always thought it looked more like an angry seahorse.

Got to see the Electric Six at a small venue last night, along with a couple other local openers that were kick-ass. I haven't really been to a show like this before, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but I had an awesome time just dancing around like an idiot and screaming to "Gay Bar". I even got to stagedive, twice- it was only for a few seconds, but it was a feeling I'll never forget.

What everyone seems to be getting at is the concept of visual clarity. From what I understand, the main reason why Core Xii finds vanilla TF2 more appealing than current hat-infested TF2 is that the former is much easier to 'read' than the latter.

Here's another good example, from Jeff Smith's most excellent comic Bone. Page is really huge, so just click the link to see it for yourself.

Take a look first at that first panel. The reader can very clearly tell what the action is for the panel: the flimsy branch that Bone and the two rat creatures were clinging onto has snapped. The reader can also tell who and what is in the frame- Bone is clearly separate from the rat creatures and background, and it is easy to tell which rat creature is in the foreground and which is in the background. The near-silhouette Smith uses in this panel is common of his style, and is seen in a lot of American comic art. Even if you weren't familiar with this style of drawing, based on the context of the previous pages you'd know what that blobby shape behind the first rat creature was supposed to be.

Going back to the original question, the point at which graphics start taking away from gameplay is the moment that it interferes with the actual functioning game. Most often this is due to a loss in visual clarity: the player can't tell what is a teammate or an enemy, or there's too many blinking numbers and flashy effects filling up the screen, or the player is stuck trying to figure out which of ten identical doors in a hallway actually has a room behind it, and which are just for decoration.

A desire for visual clarity is what was behind the still-recent movement for game developers to use minimal HUDs, or else foregoing them entirely. They may claim it's for immersion's sake, but if there's any real reason behind their popularity, it's because it gets rid of the clutter on the screen and allows the player to focus on the gameplay itself.

Does anyone remember Game Informer's coverage of Red Steel? That whole debacle is the main reason why I hardly trust game journalists to this day.

Actually no I don't, but I am curious. Care to explain?

My frustration comes from two parts: The preview and the review. The preview was a massive cover story in the beginning of 2006 (I think May, but my memory is hazy). At the front of the preview was the tagline "THE REVOLUTION: We've seen it, we've played it, and it will change everything." The article itself was one of their ten-page pieces, loaded with screenshots that, while not as glamorous as those coming out for the 360, looked damn fine. The Revolution and its oddball control scheme was the real center of the article, and much ado was made about how smooth the  pointer was, and how incredibly fun the shootouts and sword fights were. The article excitedly speculated on all of the features that the developers were promising- a hub world was one, if I recall correctly, as well as were interactive cutscenes like Half-Life 2. Turn away from your sensei while he was trying to instruct you, and he'd lash out and punish you for your disrespect. Extra usage of the motion controls, such as bowing with the remote and tilting it to lean out of corners were apparently in the works, all to make the experience that much more immersive. All in all, this preview made it sound like the Wii was getting the second coming of Goldeneye on launch day. I pre-ordered immediately.

...and then regretted it. Not for a while, though; Red Steel itself is a solid little shooter, obviously rushed out the door to meet the launch and with a barebones multiplayer mode, but the controls were not as responsive as one would have hoped for; the "box" the cursor had to step outside of to move the camera practically took up the whole screen, resulting in at times unbearably slow turns. Not a good thing for a game that was supposed to have amazing controls.

And those great screenshots in the preview?



Well, turns out they were bullshots. Here's what the game actually looks like. Not nearly as pretty, is it? If you look at the original trailers now, it's pretty obvious that the "gameplay" footage they were showing was actually pre-rendered video- video that was chopped up into screenshots to be placed in a preview.

And now we come to Game Informer's review. I wish I could find an actual copy or scan of this, but it seems that GI doesn't even have it on their site anymore. Their website's search engine only knows about the sequel, as if the first was never real. Were I able to dig up my old copy of Game Informer September 2006 (or October- again, memory is hazy), I could show you the measly half-page column they dedicate to pissing all over Red Steel, with the subtitle, "Mediocre Shooter, Now With 20% More Swords". The controls are jerky, the graphics are jagged, the voice acting's cliche, and the multiplayer feels tacked on and gimmicky. The exact OPPOSITE of what their preview said. What the hell happened? It's one thing to say that there was a different author and a different opinion writing both articles, but this seems like the two writers played completely different games.

Now here's the thing: Red Steel really is an okay game. Not good, not great, not terrible, just okay. In hindsight, it was clearly rushed to meet the launch deadline, and it's lacking some serious polish. That being said, the product that was promised and the product that was reviewed are so far apart it's absurd. One can argue about whether a game should be reviewed like a movie or like a dishwasher, but it's undeniable that somewhere, someone screwed up. How on earth do you get a disconnect like that, unless someone's lying?

The truth is, I feel like they were all lying. The magazine writers, Ubisoft, the marketing team, all of them. They provided baloney screenshots, hyped up features that weren't there, gushed over controls that really weren't that good, and duped suckers like me into paying 50 bucks for a game that wasn't ready to ship. The only piece of writing that was honest at all was practically tucked away into the corner- the review didn't even come out until a full month after the game had already released, when it would have made most of its sales anyway. Now, this isn't a Hotel Rwanda kinda situation, but surely you can see how scummy this is; Ubisoft lied, and Game Informer went along with it. Why? If I was to guess, based on past events and complaints like Gerstamnngate (ugh) and Destructoid's open letter to an unnamed publisher who tried to pay for a higher review score, it's about money. More specifically, it's about the publisher/developer assuring that their game is properly hyped, and the game journalists continuing to get games to hype up and draw readers in. In this scenario, the consumers are taken for what has been called the Hype Coaster. First the slow build-up, the teasing, the countdown to the countdown, then the deluge of info, the trailers, the previews, then the demos and the pre-order bonuses, and finally the crashing release, the heaps of praise, the twinkling promise of DLC and patches over the horizon... and somewhere in the middle of it all is the actual game, and its imperfections and broken promises and rushed ending. It may still be a good game; it may even be a great game. But it will not be the game that we imagined, the game that we and the magazine and the publisher and the developer want it to be.

Does anyone remember Game Informer's coverage of Red Steel? That whole debacle is the main reason why I hardly trust game journalists to this day.

Totally. It's fun and pretty short as far as large-studio games go.

If I'm supposed to focus on schoolwork during the fall, and get a job during the summer, when am I supposed to find time to focus on projects of my own?

Been working on a logo design for a friend's bakery. Process had been going well, she wanted something kinda pin-up like and a bit cartoony, which worked well with my abilities and tastes. Everything seemed fine, and after getting approvals on the character design I sent her my pass at the final inks. Now she's sent back a message that her business partner wants some changes. Okay, fine... but she wants me to change the whole darn thing. The costume, the pose, the proportions, the whole darn thing- where were they when we were going through the preliminary stages? My friend says she'd understand if I quit the project, and I've half of a mind to do so. I'm still new to doing this kind of work, and I'm not sure what the best course of action is... but I feel like my time and effort has been wasted because these two didn't communicate properly.

Worst case scenario, the bar doesn't get money back directly but it gets patrons that stay in the place longer (and are thus more likely to need food and drink). Adding special weekly or monthly events like tournaments or even national leaderboards can encourage return visits and create new regulars.

Here's another thought: incorporating smartphones into the quiz games you see in every bloody theater now. Use the projector the same way bars use TVs, not only displaying the questions and answers but how many participants got the question right. You could even expand beyond trivia and do a sort of Family Feud- based game that asks questions about audience's tastes- "Star Wars or Star Trek", for an easy example. On a more business-savvy (or cynical, depending on how you see it) tangent, the data and questions could be used for marketing and demographics data, although the data would still be skewed to people with smartphones who participate in silly quizzes.

New comic battle I'm working, using my supa-fancy new tablet.

I am taking classes this semester that will teach me how to draw better, program games in Flash, design interactive nonlinear stories, and how to think about human consciousness. Needless to say, my college is awesome.

Most of Tim Schafer's games have, if nothing else, a great world for the players to inhabit. Grim Fandango was a film-noir take on the Mexican afterlife, Psychonauts split itself between trippy mental planes and quirky summer camp, and Brutal Legend was an over-the-top metal fantasy land.

Just watched the clip... and boy, am I confused. Why do they begin the segment with side-by-side clips of Call of Duty and Flower when they're never mentioned once? Why are they complaining about a game that came out four years ago? Why do they assume that Fate of the World and McDonald's: The Game are specifically for tiny innocent children? Why does anyone even trust this network when they vomit such frequent nonsense?

Don't forget modern games like Vampire: The Masquerade; Bloodlines and Deus Ex. They're first-person, but their lineage is definitely from WRPGs.

One question I have is that if it is indeed for the Wii U, will either version be gimped in some manner? My guess is that it's going to be upscaled a bit for the Wii U with some gimmicky features tacked on to take advantage of the new controller, but I'd like to be proven wrong. In any case, if the multiplayer works like Dragon Quest IX, I'll be sold- although it'd be nice if there was some way to have same-screen multiplayer as well. I remember a while ago that there was a big hoopla on how there was a small amount of memory storage on the Wii remotes, such that you could transfer Miis or potentially control scheme preferences onto a remote and use them on another console. Perhaps if the developer was clever enough, they could allow to transfer your main hero character to a Remote so that you could import it into another person's game?

Also, now that I think about it, didn't Nintendo say that Wii remotes and such would work on the Wii U? So... what kind of differences are we going to see in these two versions, exactly? Is it going to be enough to justify separate releases? In any case, it is Dragon Quest, and as long as it's not unfairly difficult or tedious like DQVIII was, I'm in.