Child’s Play 2008

Sometimes I’m amazed at my geek luck.

From a comic book nerd and video game freak I often spin around in circles at what I get to do each day. It was my great fortune to attend this years Penny Arcade Child’s Play Dinner week before last. For those who get a chance to attend, this is a formal dress dinner and auction. It benefits children’s charities and is a who’s who of video game and geekdom participants. I felt completely out of my league as I traversed the auction room. Are those the Harmonix guys? Was that Gabe and Tycho? Holy Christ did Wil Wheaton just shake my hand?

I snapped a couple of low light photos with my crappy Nikon, couple of the auction:

fancy!

Another:

ooo really fancy

one of the dinner:

Should have moved closer

It was a great event and Wil actually caught up with me later in the evening to chat since his "Don’t be a Dick" speech had such an impact on me. The next day he dropped by my office after his Major Nelson interview and I got to walk him through how we police the system and do bans as well as drop him by the company store.

Overall it was a great event and if you can manage the trip or tickets to do it, it’s pretty much a no brainer as to the level of fun you will have with awesome people.

KHAAAAN! KHAAAAAAAAAN!

So as a Star Trek nerd I’ve always been a fiend for the different variations of the Starship Enterprise. I think this comes from my first real memory of Star Trek being seeing Star Trek: The Motion Picture when I was like, 5. That movie, famous for its nearly 10 minute long pan of the refitted Enterprise, cemented in me the love for the ship’s design. Because like Firefly, the ship itself was a character in the soul of the mythos.

Weirdly, my two favorite designs of the Enterprise are the one we know the most about, the refitted NCC-1701 (from Star Trek 1, Star Trek 2, and destroyed in Star Trek 3) and the one we know least about, the NCC-1701-E (from First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis). These are known respectively as the "Modified Constitution Class" and "Sovereign Class" starships. But I’ll stick with their starfleet designations.

I like them mostly for aesthetic reasons. I never liked that the nacelles in the Next Generation Enterprise (The Galaxy class NCC-1701-D) were below the dish. It struck me as a less feminine design for some reason, most likely because the saucer dish was so damn wide. It looked like someone had taken the design and smashed it flat so it lost a lot of its linear aspect in the vertical view.

The refitted NCC-1701 design always struck me as regal. A naval ship worthy of the word "she" to describe it. The dish was perfectly circular and the nacelles set high and along diagonal struts.

The B and C designs are both really just throwaway designs because they each have an accumulated screen time of like 3 minutes (the "B" in Star Trek: Generations, basically a modfied Excelsior design, and the "C" in the TNG episode "Yesterday’s Enterprise" Great episode, but the ship was only really glimpsed.) You never really see enough of them to get a sense of their design.

The "E" model represented a return to the more sleek and sexy lines of the entire ship design. The nacelles are higher, the dish is stretched out from the oval shape of the "D" and the circular shape of the 1701 or "A" model. If the NCC-1701 refit is regal, the "E" is Angelina Jolie. The design evokes an impression the ship is in high speed motion, and its squat body design implies a sense of power or menace.

YES I’M A FUCKING NERD GET OVER IT.

Anyways. Several years ago I found a really nice detailed model of the "E". It’s proudly sat on my desk for years. As a Christmas present from Lance Bubo (or more accurately a hanukkah present) He got me the same type of model of the NCC-1701:

My God Bones.  What have I done.

Here’s the two side by side:

Not to scale, weirdly the E design is roughly 2x the size of the NCC-1701

So I’m kinda geeking out right now.

Blog Banter: More games like Portal and Braid

So I’ve joined in on Hawty McBloggy’s Blog Banter, whereby a bunch of gaming bloggers all blog at the same time occasionally on a specific topic. For my first entry in this series the topic is: "If you could ask for one thing this year from the gaming industry as a whole, what would it be and why?"

I’ve been thinking about it all week feeling a little weird now that I’m actually in the industry. Should I take the approach of what I want to see that I can directly influence? That seemed too much like, I don’t know, advertising. I figured I’d just write it as a gamer. So for those who might have a litany of Xbox things they want us to change or provide, you can email me.

I want more games like Portal and Braid.

When I first read about Portal Valve had not really talked much about the "plot" so the first impression I had of it was that of a first person shooter with an interesting gimmick. Not unlike Prey or Timeshift. Since it was going to be bundled with The Orange Box (oddest product name ever) I didn’t bother to read any reviews or pay a ton of attention to it until right up to its release. I already knew I was going to get Orange Box.

I’ve since spent hours with Portal and even replayed it when it was released to Xbox LIVE Arcade. You can boil the poral gun down to a gimmick if you want, but what it did in essence was force the designers to create a new genre, a First Person Puzzler. While they aren’t my favorite, I do enjoy puzzle games greatly and get that special little pleasure synapse firing whenever I solve something particularly tough. (Which is why I also think achievements are so popular) But we all have our standard view of what puzzle games look like and how they operate. Portal has shattered that. Instead of a gimmick added to put puzzles into a shooter, they tossed out the shooter entirely and focused on fun and atmosphere. And we got a great song out of it too!

Speaking of music, that brings me to Braid. Just like how Everyday Shooter took an established convention and made it seem new, Braid takes the puzzle adventure genre and provides a new sense of style to it. I love how Braid looks.

Roger Ebert often talks about how the primary purpose of movies is to show us amazing things we wouldn’t otherwise see. This explains why he tends to be more forgiving of a films flaws if it swings for the fences in its visual imagery (like, What Dreams May Come). You’d think, therefore, he would be a bit more understanding about games as an artform, but I digress. I feel the same way about video games. I can forgive a game a lot of flaws if goes for broke on something like visual style. If you really think about it, RezHD is the simplest possible gameplay dynamic. But the music and visual style make it a blast for me to play.

Same with Braid.

Like Portal, Braid isn’t afraid to muck about with the very conventions it uses to achieve its play style. The puzzles are very clever and several of them are real stumpers. But the art, music, and "plot" all combine into a result that shows that, whatever Roger Ebert’s view, games have passed the shaky toddler crawl/stumble phase and are really ready to start walking when it comes to being an artform.

Braid and Portal each have something to say. What it is, and how they say it, is what makes them standout experiences. When you look at their remise on paper, someone is going to say "but what makes that fun?" and might not want to take a chance on it. But Valve and Jonathon Blow took a chance and put in the effort. I would love for our industry to take their example and run with it in 2009.

Other participants!

I’m thankful that:

I have the incredible opportunity to work on video games for a living, with really amazing people.

The god damn New Xbox Experience is out!

My mom rocked the guitar in Rock Band last night.

I have happy, healthy pets. Well thankful except the cat. I think the cat may be plotting to kill us all. In fact, I’m sure of it.

I have friends I can rely on to be blunt and honest with me and vice versa.

There’s someone that listens to me no matter how I ramble, that I can listen to without judgement and try to help, that is as geeky as I am, loves asparagus as much as I do, and oh let’s be honest I would pay top dollar to watch them strip. oh wow TMI? TOO LATE.

Pretty sure this post isn’t what the white folk had in mind to be thankful for before they killed a mess of Indians over the next 200 years, but it is a nice way to reflect upon that which you enjoy holding on to to stay sane! Happy Thanksgiving!