Whaaaaaaat?! You haven’t played Gamma Bros yet? The awesomely retro and most pixelacious entry in the Independent Games Festival of 2007? You haven’t doom surfed in Dino Run? And what about helping the cutest pixel rodent you ever saw locate every last crumb of cheese in Rat Maze? TWICE? Pixeljam, cats — learn well this dev because not only have they done great things in the past, their pipeline seems bursting with future win.

Jonathan Zungre and I caught up with Rich Grillotti and Miles Tilmann during GDC to talk of many things, and no, not all of them were as ridiculous as the headline indicates (just nearly). These guys are a great case study for any aspiring developers (as they managed to make the jump from hobby to full-time), and also…hilarious! Savor every unintended pun and crazy tangent…

Jonathan Zungre: So have you guys been enjoying the show?

Miles Tilmann: No, it’s been terrible.

JZ: You hate it?

MT: A living hell. It’s like a living nightmare.

Rich Grillotti: Nah, I like it. It’s awesome.

MT: Oh yeah, it’s been great. We haven’t had a lot of time to actually see the expo though. I mean, two years ago we had plenty of time because we had a booth.

Emily Balistrieri: Yeah, you were on it.

RG: And nobody really knew us, so nobody was being like, “Oh, you guys are Pixeljam!”

EB: Dude, I was psyched.

RG: Yeah, well you were ahead of the curve.

MT: You were like our first big fan.

RG: You really were. You were like the biggest Gamma Bros fan ever.

EB: Disclosure! Journalistic integrity now compromised!

RG: I trust that.

MT: Whups, yeah I don’t know the etiquette here.

RG: Yeah, we don’t know about that stuff.

MT: But this year, it’s been more just going to the sessions, and then just meeting up with a lot of people we’ve been talking to for years, but never actually met face to face. But you know everybody usually comes here so it’s just a good opportunity to meet them, see what they’re all about, see if they’re slime bags or not.

EB: *unclear*

MT: No we haven’t encountered any slime bags yet…

RG: Yeah everyone’s pretty cool. I like it.

MT: unless they’re really good at covering up, which I guess some slime bags really are, like the top-tier slime bags.

EB: The slimiest slime bags.

MT: The slimiest are like, professional actors and stuff.

RG: And we gave a talk, too, so we had to prepare for that for a couple days.

MT: The first two days was just preparing for the talk.

EB: It was a good talk.

JZ: Yeah it was. We got to see that….

JZ: So tell us a little about the early process you went through in making those first couple games. Just give some advice for people who really want to make a game and don’t know very much about it.

RG: Start very simply. Do a short game that doesn’t take a month or more to work on, maybe, just to get the practice. You learn so much each time around, you know? Every time you build a game you change the engine and change everything.

MT: Yeah, every time I made a game I thought, “I’m gonna use this engine for the next three games,” and then for the next one I would just scrap it and start over. But I didn’t really have any game programming experience before hand, so that was probably a big part of it.

JZ: Really? So what did you do? How did you learn?

MT: I just downloaded other people’s open source games and looked at their code, and then looked at tutorials for basic collision detection stuff and how to move things. It was really slow, that’s why –  I mean, Gamma Bros. took a really long time to make because it was the first game we ever made and I had never programmed anything like it before. So, we’ve been starting from the absolute ground up.

JZ: And you said working in a partnership, kind of a– What did you say? You said something like you have to work with someone who is like–

MT: Your complement. Yeah, I mean that’s been really important for us because you know, I’m probably more of like the rational dude, the programmer. Not to say that Rich isn’t rational, but you know…

RG: I’m like completely unrealistic.

Everyone: lol

EB: Rich is like foaming at the mouth right now.

MT: I’m a total tight-ass and Rich is utterly insane, so it works out.

RG: When it comes together, it’s kind of like balance.

MT: Yeah, it’s very balanced.

JZ: Did you have problems with trying to be too idealistic or too professional?

RG: With the client games, we’ve done…it’s been difficult.

MT: With the client work, yes. With our own games it’s kind of a problem, but not too much of a problem because we don’t give ourselves deadlines or anything like that. I mean some deadlines just pop up naturally because like, I dunno, going on a vaction has been planned for months, and it has to be done before that unless I want to work on it on vacation.

EB: Which defeats the purpose of that, really.

MT: Yeah, and I don’t want to have to think about it while I’m gone. But besides life’s natural deadlines we didn’t give ourselves any deadlines, so there was more room for — well, in the case of Dino Run it started so small, but then after we played the demo it was brutally hard and not fun. So, we spent the next six months making it more fun. Rich just kept on making environments for it.

RG: As much as Miles would let me.

EB: I was playing this morning before we showed up, and it was really fun. And I finally tried out the multiplayer, which is one of the things I wanted to ask of you, if working on the multiplayer for Dino Run is going to help you make co-op Gamma Bros 2.

MT: Oh boy…

EB: That’s me off in the sky, but…

MT: Yeah, I dunno. It’s pretty difficult to get flash games with tons of things happening on the screen at once working in multiplayer. I think that multiplayer usually works best for, not necessarily turn-based, but if there’s action, to have 50 things on the screen at once, and everybody has to see the exact same position of everything…I think it’s possible if you’re like some sort of coding genius; that’s probably why we’d have to hire somebody to do it. I would never want to do it. I think it would be amazing to be able to play Gamma Bros with someone else on the other side of the earth, like real time. It was kind of made for that, I guess.

RG: And the projectiles. They’re too fast… and things are just… too much action taking place at too high speeds to track it on network speeds.

MT: It might work on something like XBLA or something where…

EB: Yeah, is that something you’re looking at?

RG: I’d love to.

MT: That would be great, but it’s not something we’re actively researching right now. Every once in a  while somebody says, “Oh you should get your games on XBLA,” and we’re like, “…ok, would you like to help us do that?” It’s not as easy as it sounds, and we would have to hire a programmer to do it. I guess the Behemoth guys, they program in Flash, but then they spend the last years, I think, creating a compiler that will convert it all for them. So they’re much more gifted at programming than we are. So, one thing at a time.

RG: And then we may be able to get some kind of same keyboard co-op or vs.

EB: I have totally played same keyboard co-op with the original Gamma Bros with like a 7 year old. I had him move, and I shot — it was awesome!

RG: Yeah, that seems to happen a lot, like kids and their parents.

MT: That actually does work pretty well. But to get hot seat working where you’re controlling both ships is a little difficult because of all the keyboard conflicts. I dunno how many keys you can actually press down at the same time, and cancel others out so we have to figure that out, but it would be great. *unclear*

RG: Yeah, it’s perfect for it.

MT: If you plug in two controllers you could just map the controllers to all these weird keys that don’t conflict with each other, but that’s the only thing I can think of right now. Are we getting too technical?

JZ: No, not at all. I’m really interested. When you guys design a concept for a new game, how does that back and forth concept work? Do you just think of things you would like to draw? Like, where did the dinosaurs come from?

RG: I was sitting in a car driving to Burning Man — or like, I wasn’t driving, but I was in the passenger seat — and I was trying to think of these super mini-games that we could crank out really fast, and one of them — this word came to mind: Dino Run, and I drew some sketches of a dino running from stuff like a T-rex and a wall of doom, and tried to think of other things he might need to run from.

MT: Should I hold those photos up to the mic?

Everyone: lol

EB: I love doom surf — it’s awesome.

RG: Yeah, doom surf was an afterthought towards the end there. “We should give people a bonus cuz it’s really awesome to do this!” It just kinda spawned. And I’ll make little thumbnails and I’ll show them to Miles and *unclear* amongst another bunch of ideas, and usually one’ll be the most attractive at the moment.

MT: I think we usually both know when we have a winner.

RG: Yeah it’s been that way.

MT: There’s usually not a lot of debate on which game should be made or which character we should focus on. That’s how it was with the Gamma Bros and Rat and Dino, so… I mean, after he draws ‘em we just look at it, and that’s it — we know what it’s supposed to do.

JZ: That’s really cool. Tell me about that part about being brutally honest with each other? That’s something you said in your talk.

MT: Well, yeah, I mean it’s still something we’re working on. It was easier to do it, I think, when we were roommates a long time ago, because we had constant communication. But then we lived in different states, and then it’s a little harder cuz it’s just e-mail and Skype and stuff like that — we don’t communicate as much, but then when we did work for hire we realized we had to communicate so much more than we did for our internal projects, cuz there’s such an outrageous deadline, and it’s really stressful, and we can only put like 10 % of the things we want in the game. So then if we’re not completely honest with each other about how these decisions make us feel then somebody gets stressed out, or tense, or bitter — something.

RG: Yeah, sometimes Miles’ll just — I’ll present some stuff and he’ll just be like, “No, we can’t really do that,” and I won’t say anything and then I’ll present some more stuff an he’ll be like, “No we can’t really do that” and then–

MT: And he’s got like a voodoo doll of me.

Everyone: lol

RG: and then little by little — I don’t even realize it, but I’m just getting frustrated, and then some mental spin starts coming on that’s irrational and insane.

MT: And I get a pain in my kidney, like two states away.

Everyone: LOL

RG: And then all it takes is like, “So how’s it going?” to actually talk about how things are going.

MT: “I actually hate you right now.”

RG: How do we feel about having to go in and… that usually starts a good conversation, like, “Well actually I’ve been frustrated here and there, and I want to do this, ” and Miles is like, “Well, you just don’t understand. This is about programming” and I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right, I know. I don’t blame you; it’s just the situation.”

MT: And then we cry and hug.

Everyone: lol

JZ: That’s like a good show.

RG: A virtual hug.

MT: Is this like a drama, sitcom?

RG: And it’s also difficult to communicate sometimes cuz my schedule is way late and Miles’ is really early. So it’s almost like being on opposite ends of the earth, but we’re not even — same time zone.

JZ: But if you didn’t have that brutal honesty then things would fall through and you probably–

RG: Then we’d harbor resentment, and wouldn’t want to hang out or work with each other. We wouldn’t be happy, basically. But every time we talk and try to see things from each other’s perspective it really helps, cuz any arguments and judgments or resentments kind of dissolve because the facts are clear.

MT: That’s just good advice for life in general, really.

EB: Yeah, any relationship.

MT: But I think a lot of game designers are like, “Communication?” If they’re not working on big teams, they don’t realize how incredibly important it is.

JZ: Well how long have you guys been friends?

MT: Since like ninety… six?

RG: 12 or 13 years.

MT: 12 or 13 years, yeah.

JZ: Oh, wow.

RG: We were working together.  Before the game stuff we did Flash projects for clients for years; we did a lot photography…

MT: Kind of like a hive mind going on. At its best it’s like we usually agree about what needs to be done. We don’t agree about how it needs to be done, but we know what should be done, usually.

JZ: That’s cool. And what made you passionate about this in the first place? Why did you guys want to start doing this?

RG: Oh, I’ve always wanted to make games. I was a huge gamer. I was born–

MT: He was born in a game.

RG: I was born in a game and I eventually became self aware and found a way to materialize in the physical world.

Everyone: lol

JZ: This is amazing. This is an amazing story.

EB: Wow, good job!

JZ: This is a SCOOP!

MT: He’s never told anybody. He never told me either!

RG: Yeah, I try to keep it quiet. I don’t want the government coming to check me out, put me in some lab.

EB: You bleed pixels.

RG: I do, yeah, they hurt sometimes.

JZ: What game did you start in? Was it like a gritty game, a fun game?

RG: The first game we tried to start making?

JZ: No, what game did you become self aware in?

MT: Uh oh.

RG: Oh, oh, right, it was probably Adventure.

MT: He was the dot.

EB: He grabbed the key and suddenly the light shown down.

RG: Right, the bat took me to this place that I had never seen before. And there was this bright light, and then, as a block, I went towards the light, and then I could decide what to do and I was like, “Oh, be a human.” Came out here, it’s been all right. Maybe I’ll jump back some time and slay some dragons. One on one, face to face.

MT: That’s not a duck?

EB: The origin story…

RG: That’s a dragon…

MT: I thought it was duck.

RG: *unclear* without legs or anything. They’re…sweet. So I dunno. I’ve grown up with games and I really love ‘em, so I’ve always wanted to do it.

JZ: Have you guys seen anything at the festival, with the other independent guys, that has really inspired you?

RG: Yeah, there’s some cool stuff.

JZ: Where you were like, “Holy crap, I wanna do that,” or, “We should do something like that”?

RG: Well, I don’t necessarily be like, “I wanna do what someone else did,” but I do get inspired.

JZ: “We should steal that.”

MT: “I wanna steal that.”

RG: I saw this thing — it’s like you match three things and they disappear.

MT: I think it’s called Match-3. There’s like this new genre of game out now…

Everyone: LOL

RG: Yeah, it’s completely inspiring; we’re probably going to go in that direction for all our games now.

MT: And there’s like one where you own a restaurant, in a diner and you’re running really fast. You’re like, dashing through a diner.

JZ: So you dash?

MT: Yeah, it’s like Restaurant Rush or something like that.

JZ: I heard about this game where you line up blocks and then they disappear? You should check that out. It’s hot and new.

RG: All this kind of stuff is just really hot right now. No…

RG: Did you go to the Experimental Gameplay?

JZ: Yeah.

EB: All two and a half hours!

MT: To me that was more inspiring than any of the other stuff.

RG: Yeah, working with the shadows as platforms, moving the light sources — that was brilliant.

JZ: Was that your favorite out of the ones that you saw?

MT: I think my favorite — I can’t pronounce his last name, but his name is Daniel — and he made the Storyteller and Fate games.

JZ: Is that the one we were talking about?

EB: Yeah, with the moon.

JZ: The moon, yeah, that’s incredible.

MT: Well in the Storyteller one you’re altering the beginning to change the middle and end, but you can alter the end to change the beginning.

RG: Oh, that one, three frames. That was amazing.

JZ: That guy’s hair was ridiculous — shaved and then on one side a swoop.

RG: He’s a really nice guy. We met him last night at the *unclear* party.

MT: That’s how they roll in Europe. [Daniel is actually from Argentina. - Ed.]

JZ: Do they?

MT: Yeah, I think it’s like old people have that hair style over there.

JZ: Pass it down from generation to generation.

MT: It’s like his family hair. He inherited it.

EB: Ohhhhhh, ohhhhhh.

JZ: Can’t grow it any other way. What? Oh, “in-HAIR-ited.”

MT: Ohhhh no!

JZ: Was that intentional?

MT: No, that wasn’t.

EB: Yes it was!

MT: No, it wasn’t, it really wasn’t.

EB: Take credit!

MT: Ba-dum-bum.

RG: So I always liked, well, Cortex Command is just out of control awesome. Are you familiar with that one?

EB: I haven’t played it…

JZ: It won two awards, though, right?

RG: It’s like, super destructible pixel environment. Awesome amazing graphics.

MT: He’s been working on it for like seven years.

RG: It’s great — I just wanna go play. That’s one of the games I really wanna go play some more. There are so many good ones this year, really impressive. When Gamma Bros was here two years ago, it was good stuff, but this year I was like, “Damn!” you know? It’s really steppin’ up, and that’s great. We’re really happy.

I liked in, I think it was the first talk at the IGS [Independent Games Summit], Ron Carmel, I think? He put it out there right away, like we’re not competing here in this indie business, the independent game scene. It’s very friendly and fun, and it’s great if everyone succeeds; and everyone’s doing their own thing, so it doesn’t feel like to me a competition at all.

MT: Until everyone’s rich.

RG: Yeah, once the money starts rollin’ in, ideas start becoming scarce cuz everyone’s drying up.

MT: Rar, no more sharing.

RG: Who knows? But I like this collaborative environment between companies.

JZ: Does it feel like a family?

RG: It does.

MT: It really does, yeah.

RG: A strange family.

MT: And we don’t have Thanksgiving together, or anything, but you know…

RG: Not yet, that’ll be the indie biz thanksgiving dinners.

EB: That would be actually really awesome.

JZ: That would be really cool, actually.

EB: The indie dev Thanksgiving…

JZ: Cranberry sauce!

RG: That would be amazing.

EB: We could have it at my house!

RG: That would be a big ol’ table.

MT: Can you fit like 150 dudes? And a few ladies?

EB: Uhhh…we could have it at Dolores park.

MT: Yeah.

RG: Oh, you know, I liked You Have To Burn The Rope a lot.

JZ: Yeah, what did you think about that? What do you think the significance of that is? Or is it just something that’s quirky just to be quirky.

RG: It’s just… it’s fun! I dunno.

MT: You have to burn the rope! You have to burn it!

JZ: That’s it!

EB: It really is.

RG: It’s like a joke and it’s a commentary.

JZ: You think it’s a commentary?

RG: Sure, yeah.

MT: About rope burning…

JZ: About songs…

RG: I guess it’s like, on the puzzle aspect of games. It just helps avoid all the frustration of trying to figure something out that’s kind of cryptic. I dunno.

MT: Maybe all games will be like that one day.

JZ: Really ridiculously easy and short.

EB: And the instructions will just be on the screen to tell you.

RG: I kind of wish they had many levels. Like, I like that it’s simple and one level and it’s over, but it would’ve been great if the next level was, “You have to jump on its head,” or… telling you exactly what to do, see how much fun it would be like ten levels from then.

JZ: If you kept on getting told what to do.

EB: You have to grab the key.

RG: If it would actually remain fun. Right now it’s kinda novel. It’s just a good art idea.

JZ: I was thinking about maybe it being a commentary about how games reward you really well for doing really easy things (You know what I mean? You always become the hero for doing something that almost anyone can do when they play the game…) and if that translates over to life or people start to think that way. I dunno, just tossing ideas around.

RG: I dunno. It’s a little harder to get rewarded in life sometimes.

JZ: You have to do more than burn the rope.

RG: And no one tells you.

JZ: Yeah, and no one tells you you have to.

EB: You have to figure out to burn the rope on your own.

JZ: And you have to burn it better than anyone else — or first.

EB: You have to light your own torch!

RG: That’s right, you gotta build your own torch.

JZ: We’re getting really figurative.

RG: Yeah, I dunno.

EB: One thing I wanted to ask you guys was that, you said in your talk the other day that it’s important to know when to kinda set an idea on the shelf. And I wondered if that bothers you or if it feels kind of good to have all these little friends in a drawer?

RG: That’s nice, yeah it’s like we have these kinda half grown children…

Everyone: LOL

MT: Kinda like mutant children.

EB: That you hide in the closet!

RG: We keep them in the basement and we throw like, legs of meat down there once in a while and tell them to be quiet.

JZ: Sounds like a good game!

RG: No….

MT: They’re slowly getting angrier and angrier.

RG: Right…getting stronger with *unclear* It’s scary, actually.

JZ: Tell us about these half-grown children? Which ones are your favorites?

RG: Well, they’re all our favorites.

MT: Errr yeah, no favorite.

RG: I’d like to get back to each one of them in their own time.

MT: I think I’m most excited about The Bee Game.

EB: Can you tell us anything about it? Cuz everyone knows “The Bee Game…”

MT: You’re a bee.

EB: lol

RG: Like a honeybee.

MT: You build your hive, collect pollen, you know — resource management. And then you battle other wasps and hornets like Joust.

JZ: Ooh, that sounds good.

RG: We’re gonna have — you get better and better. You can squirt nectar in different ways…

JZ: Can bees do that?

RG: No, it’s a game.

EB: Games have mechanics ;D

RG: So we’re not trying to do a bee sim for educational purposes.

MT: We actually have an actual…

RG: Could be useful, though, if you strip out all the…

EB: I mean, they should just shoot lasers at that point!

RG: They might.

JZ: Machine guns?

MT: No machine guns.

JZ: No machine guns…

MT: It’s more than a concept. We actually have all of these things playable, like where your hive expands, and you battle wasps, and you collect pollen, and you go explore an ant hill, and collect honeycombs, and stuff.

RG: Pollinate new plants with the pollen that you’re carrying…*unclear* create new flowers…

MT: Yeah, oh right — so you find these new strains of flowers that you can multiply on the ground and get their type of pollen and use it back in your hive to create new and exciting little — like bee alchemy.

EB: Sounds good.

JZ: Bee Mogul.

MT: But for some reason we just — oh, I know why we had to stop. It was because we were trying to simulate ants crawling the walls of an ant hill, and at the time I had no idea how to do that. It was a long time ago when I didn’t know how to program anything except blocks flying around and shooting blocks, and so it just got too frustrating and we had to stop. It was like, we’ll come back to this when I actually know what I’m doing.

RG: Yeah, we realized it wasn’t going to be the game we really wanted it to be, so we had to wait.

JZ: Is it hard to do that? Is it hard to say like, “We can’t do this anymore”?

RG: No, it wasn’t hard, it was just obvious. And then other stuff, like if we stay on one project too long, it kinda gets a little tiring. Or especially in a situation like that, where it’s like you start realize it’s not going quite how you want it to, and you’ve been on it for a while, and then something else — there’s always ideas springing up. Like, “Maybe we’ll do a quick game! We’ll do a little, fast game,” which turns into a seven month Dino Run.

MT: Errrrrrr… yeah.

RG: But when we start out with the idea of doing a fast game things balloon.

MT: Maybe someday we’ll make a tiny game.

RG: Yeah, we’re kinda getting there. We’re getting pretty close.

MT: I think we’re getting to that point.

JZ: Do you think you’ll ever expand your team? Include more people?

RG: We are, yeah.

MT: We actually just did. Yeah, I don’t have to program that much anymore.

EB: Yeah, I noticed you guys have a new programmer.

MT: I’m pretty excited. Yeah, we found some really creative talented people that really want to help us make these games so, they’re on board and excited, and we’re extremely excited to have them.

JZ: Awesome.

MT: So now it’s just kind of like figuring out what the next steps are. I can think more about the design and the production with Rich, and I don’t have to do all the nuts and bolts…

JZ: Oh, that’s great, man.

MT: which is a real mental strain.

RG: And these guys are really experienced.

MT: These guys are like ten times better than I could ever hope to be.

JZ: Cool.

RG: Yeah, so we got also some visual artists as well. We found some pixel artists that I actually really have confidence in, that can work with us successfully, carry on the style, and bring some new stuff to the table, which is already happening. We got one guy working on the backgrounds for Gamma Bros 2, which we’re working on.

EB: I can’t wait! I can’t! I cannot!

RG: I can’t wait either, but…we have to.

MT: We have to wait.

RG: Yeah, so we’re trying to nail the environments because there are gonna be caverns and lava caves…

EB: Nice!

RG: and pretty interesting little things that weren’t in the first one, so…

EB: I like tidbits like that! Keep ‘em coming!

RG: Yeah, I dunno… some kinda– no I can’t say anything. They’ll go into some other rooms in the space station, for sure. And there are new ships.

EB: Eat breakfast…

RG: They might, yeah, we’ll see.

MT: They should eat breakfast, probably.

RG: Right?

EB: It’s the most important meal of the day! Little pixel eggs, pixel bacon — I wanna see it!

RG: You know I have a pixel chef from those original things… flipping an egg.

MT: Oh yeah, he is about the same scale as the bros. too, ey?

RG: Yep.

MT: I remember him, yeah.

RG: Yeah, these characters, they’re are all just waiting dearly for their own chance to game.

MT: There are a lot of them just waiting patiently.

JZ: Children.

RG: Yes. Those are like our undeveloped fetuses.

Everyone: LOL

EB: Zygotes. You got little zygotes, just on ice.

Rich: They haven’t even made it into a game concept yet.

MT: Hundreds of little pixel fetuses

RG: Swimming around…

MT: waiting to gestate in the womb of Rich’s brain…

RG: and on… photoshop files…

EB: Awesome.

RG: …for direction. Yeah, so,  it’s exciting. A pixel artist, I’m really happy to work with. Then things will go a lot faster. Cuz I’ve been doing… like Dino Run was a lot, and Cookie Party [2], and these other ones. The new — we got one coming out soon for Adult Swim, it’s like a pizza delivery game. And I had to do everything like all the vehicles, all the environments…

MT: EVERYTHING.

RG: …buildings, the characters, some interface stuff, and it just took away from stuff I’d most like to do. Like I really would like to focus on the characters and objects, maybe the vehicles, and have someone else do the world. Or start a style and then hand it off. It’s just so much for one person. I really realized that and want more help on these games.

JZ: That’s exciting for you guys. You can step back and be the directors more.

RG: Yeah, I’ll always be making stuff, but then if we really are confident in someone they can do their thing and we’ll just be like quality control, or in case there is stuff that we think needs adjusting, but you know, I don’t need to have my hands in everything if I can trust someone to do a good job.

JZ: Anything else you guys want to say before we wrap this one up?

MT: I don’t think so. I think i said everything.

EB: He’s like, “Nooooooo.”

JZ: Everything… The sun’s getting hot, yeah.

RG: Yeah, we have a bunch of games in mind. A lot of stuff.

MT: There’s a lot coming up, but now it’s more realistic that it’s actually going to happen, cuz when it was just the two of us — we have like 20 game ideas we really want to see happen.

RG: Or more.

MT: Or more, yeah.

RG: It’s always growing.

MT: We could show you the list. It’s kind of ridiculous. Half of them are porn, though.

Everyone: LOL

MT: So those probably won’t happen.

RG:  A lot of kids are our audience, so we gotta do something new for them.

MT: I was just joking about the…porn…

RG: Yeah…*unclear*

JZ: It’s gonna be the headline.

MT: Pixeljam games moving towards porn!

EB: Pixeljam moves into the porn industry!

JZ: And only porn…

EB: Pixelporn.

RG: I have made some nude pixel people before, but it’s under tight wraps.

MT: It’s classy, it’s classy.

RG: It is actually, yeah.

MT: It’s like fine art photography, except with pixels.

RG: And we also have some ideas — we’re actually starting to work on some non-pixel games through a non-pixel, like not through Pixeljam, cuz that’s gotta stay pure — pixely stuff — but so, we just have other ideas.

MT: I forgot about that, yeah.

RG: Other opportunities show up, other people who want to work — it’s like a collaborative. Other people come to us, and we’ll be just like a focal point for some of these, and then put it out and share equally or share whatever percentage that makes sense…

MT: In the hundreds of dollars that these games make.

RG: Yes.

MT: Hundreds and hundreds of dollars. All these ones falling from the sky!

JZ: And change!

MT: Making a pile about half a foot tall.

Everyone: lol

RG and EB: Nice.

EB: Slowly but surely, though. You guys are up ‘n up, so…

MT: We’ll see what happens.

EB: Up ‘n up ‘n up…

JZ: Awesome guys, good luck!

MT: Thanks!

RG: Thank you.

• pixeljam Fundraiser: Huge Transformers Auction
• E3 2007: Midway Unveils Lineup

Diner Dash must be really popular to warrant three new ports five years after its original release, since Hudson has announced that it’s coming to WiiWare, PSN, and XBLA. They’re even throwing in some multiplayer.

For those who have somehow remained unfamiliar with the basic premise, you play as Flo who does her best to keep customers happy in a succession of more complicated restaurants. You need to deal with the range of tasks from seating the hungry queue, to taking orders, to clearing the dishes,  and everything in between.

I got to spend a few minutes in a multiplayer match. You can play co-op, but I think the Tip Wars (first to hit target cash) and Time Wars (most cash in the time limit) are going to end up being the most fun. There’s nothing quite like snatching a table’s order right under your opponent’s nose.

Up to 8 players can go at it online, but if you’re feeling anti-social you can drown yourself in endless-shift mode to see how long you survive.

All three versions should be out later this year, so get your sprint in shape.

• Preview: Water Warfare
• Preview: Military Madness
• Bomberman Live to get Another Bomb-Up Pack Featuring Two New Levels

After announcing Onslaught earlier this year, Hudson unveiled a second WiiWare FPS during their GDC meetings: Water Warfare. It’s about as family friendly as you can get, with players running around a playground (beach, Venetian city, and or dessert) as a kid with a squirt gun and a wetter and wetter t-shirt representing their health bar.

The game features eight total maps (two sizes for each location) and six different battle modes like straight-up death match or Treasure Chest, a capture the flag variant; Base, where you capture check points; and even one called Point Rally, where you don’t shoot but just have a foot race around the map. Online multiplayer for eight is the most exciting part, but split-screen local for two works as well. Single players have access to a set of training missions, but you’ll definitely want to find some buddies to play with.

As far as weapons, there are some standard varieties available — pistols (which you can dual wield), machine guns, grenade launchers — but we’d like to see a BFG in the form of The Hose. The reload mechanic is kind of a pain in the ass, since it involve finding and loitering briefly near a water fountain, but it obviously makes sense for the concept.

I was a little wary at first of the way you have to aim off screen to turn your character, as it’s been implemented poorly in the past in other games, but after a couple minutes you get used to it, and then my only issue was the lack of a cover mechanic, although I’m sure experienced FPS players will know plenty of ways to take advantage of playground tunnels and whatnot.

Expect Water Warfare to hit this summer just as it’s hot enough to actually get outside and have a real water fight. They can’t all be sunny days!

• NintendoWares: Water Warfare, Reel Fishing, Reversi, Sudoku and Fantasy Zone II
• Nintendo Download 2/9/2012
• Nintendo Download 2/2/2012
• Nintendo Download 1/26/2012
• Nintendo Download 1/19/2012
• Nintendo Download 1/12/2012

Way before Advance Wars, there was Military Madness for TurboGrafx-16, and now, here it is again, only for XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare. Hudson is doing a full 3-D remake of the original campaign, but also throwing in a brand new multiplayer mode.

Obviously a classic turn-based strategy game is going to play like one, so you’ll be hoofing your infantry around a hex grid map to take bases, or fulfilling kill all missions. Tanks and other vehicles play their roles in the color-coded faction war as well.

Four player local (including hot seat) or online multiplayer battles, though, that’s where the excitement is this time around. You can play free-for-all or on teams, with a turn or time limit set to however long a match you’d like to squeeze in. Plus, in multiplayer only, they’ve introduced a commander unit with special abilities — a bit of a modernizing touch.

Military Madness is expected to appear on at least one of the platforms by this summer, with the other two to follow shortly.

• Preview: Diner Dash
• Preview: Water Warfare
• Bomberman Live to get Another Bomb-Up Pack Featuring Two New Levels

What’s the value of a used game? From now on, it’s whatever someone is willing to trade you for it. SwitchGames is a new website with the power to change the way we handle our used game transactions — like we need an excuse to not get ripped off by GameStop! Yesterday I got a chance to talk with founder Jason Crawford about how the site works and the new features they’ll be rolling out soon.

I had poked around and registered for the service prior to meeting Jason, so I was already pretty addicted. When someone tells you, “It’s a site for trading used games,” it doesn’t seem that exciting, but after posting a couple of my games and seeing the types of matches their SwitchBot was coming up with, I was actually searching my collection for not just any games I didn’t really want, but also any games I could bear to tear off my shelves, just so I could have more assets to work with.

I asked him right away if they had plans to expand into DVDs, but he said, “”It was a very conscious decision to do it like we did it, which is keep it game focused,” citing the community focus, but also noting that their site runs on a system that could be applied to other communities, which could in turn be networked. “We think games are the biggest problem right now with what fans get for their buck, what they get for things that they own that are used.” I’d be totally down for SwitchDVDs, SwitchBooks, and SwitchTunes, in the future…

Back to the present, though. What we have is SwitchGames and it’s pretty awesome. The system already works, and it’s free at its core. Using the slick “Chevron” triangle button interface, you make a wishlist, show off what you have for trade, and the SwitchBot tells you if there are any perfect matches. Eventually you’ll also be able to import things like your Xbox Gamertag to your profile, as well as export your SwitchGames info to places like FaceBook.

As far as trading goes, I’ve found it’s best to be proactive. No sense being shy when there are items you want floating around. You can message members and see if anything you have appeals to them, and you’re allowed to have multiple offers out on one game — “You wanna be in a room and say, ‘Who wants this?’” Jason explained, as opposed to having your assets locked up. First come, first serve!

The initial safety measures are very basic: their effective anti-fraud tools (“Just because someone’s not paying for the service doesn’t mean we don’t care about the users that are using it for free, ’cause this is a community and we’re trying to take care of the community as well.”) and user feedback ratings, plus a series of badges that members earn for things like certain amounts of positive transactions, tenure, and helping out the site or users by, for example, reporting bugs. “You could, over time, build up all these badges and have a great reputation, and do tons of trades and never spend a dime on SwitchGames, and we’re totally cool with that; that’s totally fine.”

Of course, they’d rather you spend at least a couple dimes, and that’s where many of their upcoming features come in. First, you can buy yourself a verified member badge for $1.95. This validates your credit card, shipping address, and phone number and just makes you look more legit. There will also eventually be a plus membership badge, which essentially gives you a power seller (and soon you will actually be able to buy and sell on the site) status, with an extra set of tools and discounts on Safe Trades.

Safe trading is the biggest for-cash change. For $6.95 you are guaranteed a safe trade, and that includes postage as well. Instead of having to trade addresses as well as games, both parties use the automated packing label the site generates to send their games to a SwitchGames hub (currently in NY and CA, but due to sprout up countrywide a la Netflix). They check out the games and make sure you’re getting what you agreed on–including the manual if that’s what was promised.

Another handy thing is that once you agree to a trade, the site reminds you with an orange exclamation point that you have outstanding tasks to do, generally about mailing off your game. You can also see your trading partners to-do list, so you can tell if they’ve sent it off or not.

Speaking of which, I have someone sending me Gears of War, so I should get my trade in the mail. “I’m a user,” Jason told me, “I used to do all my transactions at GameStop before I created SwitchGames. Now I do them all on SwitchGames.”

It just makes so much sense.

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So here’s the plot of the latest City of Heroes mission: Samantha is really upset–so upset she has a blue emo tear stain–because her cousin Jimmy died last year and the crew of same whack-job TV show called Voices from Beyond claims he has a message for her. Your job is to go to the studio offices and get to the bottom of things. Sure enough **spoilers!!!!11!!!1!!** the Grips and Supposed Psychics are holding the ghost of Cousin Jimmy hostage so they can make big bucks shelling out secrets of the departed.  Free Jimmy so he can RIP, take out the Producer of the show, Roger Hackleby, and you have effectively saved the day.

Does that sound totally lame or what? Yeah it does, and I’ll tell you why—I wrote it.

Issue 14 is not just another cool free update for City of Heroes–it’s a first for MMOs. The Mission Architect system gives players story arc creation tools that were originally intended to replace the dated spreadsheet system the developers were using. That was before lead designer on the project, Joe Morrissey, thought it would be fun to let everybody have a go. Both Joe, and Matt Miller, the senior lead designer on City of Heroes, were in San Francisco at the Bently Reserve (architecturally interesting its own right) this week to give us a sneak peak.

Unlike most games with level creation systems, City of Heroes’ is integrated into the world of the game. Every zone with buildings will soon have a branch of Architect Entertainment, a virtual entertainment complex for heroes and villains alike. Logging into a terminal gives you access to the browse and play list, where you can sort shared content by rating (up to five stars), length, and moral slant. You can also search by title, id number, or designer. Meta, but I like it!

Another tab, called My Creations, lets you see the arcs saved locally on your computer (about 100KB a piece), as well as the up-to-three you have already unleashed on the CoH community. Using tools nearly identical to what is arguably still the best character creation system in an MMO to date, you can design your own NPCs and enemies (from their power sets to their physical appearance)  to populate your missions, but let’s take a look at the three basic steps to creating a story arc:

Story Settings

Give your arc an epic title or no one will want to play it! Tell us what sort of heroic/dastardly deeds you’ll be expected to perform. Who (or what—you’re allowed to use objects, like that awesome radio) is the contact? What clues do they give you? You can have up to five missions in an arc (which means up to fifteen missions published at one time).

Mission Settings

There are around 1,000 different maps you can use spanning pretty much every location in the game. Remember those caves that lead into offices? You can totally use that. Any enemy group in the game can be
plopped in there to fight against, but as I mentioned, you can also create your own.  You can even make a custom ringleader and have his underlings be generic gangsters.

Mission Details

There are ten different goals you can choose from—pretty much the typical type of missions you would expect: kill all, fight a boss, rescue someone, collect objects, and the like, but you can chain them together to create stories like the one Joe demoed for us about a group of News Breakers (i.e. us, faithfully recreated in the game world as super-powered game journos) being held hostage by the Developers so they couldn’t write anything bad about their horrible game. First you had to rescue all your allies, and then you had to “hurt The Bottomline.” The creator writes all the dialogue for these encounters, and even set the animations. You can have enemies just stand around or they could be patrolling a specific area on look-out.

There are so many options here it might hurt you brain, but every feature has a handy ? button that explains what it does and what you might want to do with it. I pretty much never putz with level creators because even if they aren’t too technical, they just seem too technical, but with this system I was easily able to put together and test my silly mission (with four custom characters) in just a couple hours.

Since the beta started there have been almost 400 arcs uploaded, and once the system goes live thousands will surely follow, but what are the incentives to playing them? Turns out, pretty much the same incentives to playing anything else in the game. You get equivalent experience and influence (currency), plus tickets (think Skeeball), which are redeemable for prizes in the form of enhancements, salvage, recipes for the invention system. You can also choose to buy cheaper random rolls instead of saving up for something specific.

In addition to just having a lot of customer service in place to make sure the content is acceptable, there are a couple factors that encourage users to make great stories. First of all, there is the chance to get picked up for the Hall of Fame, or even Developer’s Choice. Any arc you create that gets added to the Hall of Fame stays published while being removed from your limited three, allowing you to make more kick-ass content. Plus, every time someone plays a mission you created, you earn tickets, too!

I hope the Mission Architect positively explodes. The update goes live next month and in April a new PC and Mac compatible Architect Edition boxed version of the game goes out. I definitely recommend you check it out even if you haven’t been a City of Heroes player up to this point–this is one update worthy of any MMO gamer’s attention.

• City of Heroes Freedom Available to All
• Released Image Teases New City of Heroes Storyline
• Blade & Soul: A Captivating Journey Through the Dragon Forest Zone
• Guild Wars 2 – Brutal New Charr Video And Wallpapers
• Forget That Foolish Commando, Guild Wars 2 Thief Profession Is FTW!!
• NCSoft Gives $6.3 Million to Japan Relief Effort

“A little Japanesey, way off kilter,” is how Pit Crew Panic was initially described to me at Hudson’s event last week. I just sort of blinked as the six creepily babelicious, bobble-headed gals busied themselves about a giant wedding cake. It needed fixing.

Oversized toilet? Aircraft carrier? Sunflowers? Sure, they fix that, too. And you can help! Basically, the point of this new WiiWare game is to assign your crew to repair different broken zones of various items, but if you’re savvy, you’ll help them out by accompanying their labor with the indicated Remote gesture–hammering, cranking, etc. I love that somehow this constitutes “Normal” mode, and as you progress you unlock higher classes of items to attend to. Naturally, the Golden Gate Bridge is pretty tricky– Class A.

“Abnormal” mode is where you’ll find the competitive 2 vs. 2 or 3 vs. 1 team set up–co-op is drop-in anytime. Apparently, you’ll even be able to play online. It’s pretty hectic when you first jump in, what with all the pointing and clicking and hammering, but there is an in-game tutorial if you need it.

No date yet for Pit Crew Panic, but we’ve been told the game is pretty much done, so I imagine we’re down to scheduling logistics. Expect it to be priced within the typical 800-1000 point range.

• Check Out Nintendo’s Japanese 3DS Launch Video
• Vanquish Demo Speed Run is Insane
• New Deus Ex: Human Revolution TGS 2010 Trailer Sounds Good in Japanese
• Week One Japanese Sales Of Slim 360 Fail to Perform
• New Japanese Kirby’s Epic Yarn Trailer Will Melt Your Heart
• Vanquish Demo Now Available on Xbox Live and PSN

Annnnnnd we’re sky diving! The babies are crying, the cows need milking, the shirts need ironing, and you had better for God’s sake waggle that skillet before the frying food bits burn. What the heck does a CEO do in the context of a Wii game, anyhow?

Deca Sports has Hudson pretty happy, so they’re ready to throw their next mini-game compilation at you, this time in the form of the occupation-to-mini-game distillation system, Help Wanted. You can go head-to-head at 15 of the 50 jobs, although we’re not sure which. Astronaut? Haunted house monster? Sumo referee? Check the full list after the jump and look for Help Wanted next summer, unless you’d rather make a couple bucks actually working.

1.Cleaning Crew

2.Newscaster

3.Astronaut

4.Babysitter

5.Beach Waiter

6.Boat Captain (Resort Captain)

7.Bodybuilder

8.Master Higgins

9.Market Clerk

10.Cook

11.Dairy Farmer

12.Dentist

13.CEO

14.Dry Cleaner

15.Emergency Medical Technician

16.Exercise Instructor

17.Farmer

18.Fire Fighter

19.Fisherman

20.Arctic Delivery

21.Game Creator

22.Goalkeeper

23.Grill Cook

24.Haunted House Monster

25.Interpreter

26.Interpreter*

27.Interviewer

28.Clown

29.Lighting Crew Member

30.Make-up Artist

31.Manicurist

32.Courier

33.Pinch Hitter

34.Pit Crew

35.Pizza Chef

36.Policeman

37.Crane Operator

38.Art Restorer

39.Security Guard

40.Aerial Camera

41.Stunt Car Driver

42.Submarine Crew

43.Sumo Referee

44.Action Hero

45.Sushi Master

46.Tailor

47.Teacher

48.TV Camera Person

49.TV Shopping Crew

50.Volleyball Referee

*We’re just as puzzled about this as you are. Hope to have an answer soon :D

• Bomberman Creator Hudson Soft Lays Down Its Last Bomb
• Mario Party Series Possibly On Indefinite Hold
• Bomberman Coming for WiiWare
• Hudson Soft to Bring Three Franchises to 3DS at Launch

You want to know something random? You can hook up seven controllers to a PS3. Seven is a lucky number, but it seems like sort of a random one to be the local simultaneous multiplayer limit. In any case, Bomberman Ultra will take full advantage.

This Bomberman will be pretty much the Bomberman that Xbox players experienced last year, only with all the expansion packs included off the bat (hence, the “Ultra”). That means 14 levels and tons of characters to mix ‘n match custom bombermen. Gameplay is all the same—down to the Revenge carts that let you bomb characters from the periphery of the board once you die—with fully customizable rule sets (which power ups are on, whether the stage gimmick is in play).

All the achievements will carry over to the PSN version as Trophies, and the game will also take advantage of voice chat and the EyeToy for the eight player online matches. Hudson is hoping to release Bomberman Ultra sometime in January, and although a final price point hasn’t been decided yet, it will cost less than purchasing the XBLA version plus expansions.

• US PlayStation Store Update – July 5, 2011

Do you like to roll marbles? How about marbles shaped like ADORABLE ANIMALS? Then perhaps you’ve heard of Kororinpa: Marble Mania, which came out last year for Wii. I took a look at next spring’s sequel the other night at a Hudson event.

Seven areas, 150 levels, 20 marbles–including one that will house the Mii of your choice whose stats are completely customizable. I played as a blue Angler fish in a not-too-nooby, not-too-tricky level. The gimmick was this certain type of block, sort of like an accordion, which would expand and contract–usually right as I was trying to roll over it. Sometimes they made a horizontal bridge, but sometimes a block would expand upwards like an elevator. With a well timed tilt (it’s all motion-controlled) and jerk, you could hop over impatiently, but it was pretty hard to hop and not fly completely off the level. This seems like nothing compared to having to flip over in crazy space stages with weird gravity, though.

The major new feature for Kororinpa this time around is the inclusion of balance board support in a separate mode. It looked pretty functional, but tendinitis kept me from taking it for a tilt, myself. You’ll also be able to create and share custom stages via Wi-Fi, which will undoubtedly add tons of replayability. Probably shouldn’t underestimate four player split-screen, either (even though we’re all spoiled from not having to share the screen via Xbox LIVE.)

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Do you remember Matt Hazard? Yeah, his prime is definitely past, but the action hero is coming back in Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, a sequel to a series of games that never actually existed. D3Publisher showed off some pre-alpha of their new third person shooter, and it actually looks worthy of misplacing some nostalgia over.

Picture a space marine in retirement, ok, maybe not really a space marine, but he’s just as bald as one. You’ve pictured Matt Hazard, a has-been following the severe downturn of his illustrious career with that awful looking kart racer, Haz-Matt Karts (or so the lore goes). When Wallis Wesley III gains control over Matt’s old publisher, Marathon, and invites him to come back for a fancy next gen title (yep, it’ll be on Xbox 360 and PS3), well, such things generally turn out too good to be true. Now Matt has to beat the game or, you know, die.

Luckily he’s got contact with QA, his real world sidekick projected as a hologram in-game, to be helpful as the onslaught of enemies ensues. The level we saw was a hostage rescue—one of Matt’s old game pals–the venue: a nightclub fronted by a butcher shop. First you’re just shooting pretty generic thugs/agents, but things get a bit meta as the big bad guys engineering the game start hacking stuff in left and right. Zombies? Sure! Cowboys, and a whole Wild West showdown? You bet! It’s not totally random—Matt has a long history and his nemesis clearly knows how to reach—since all of these challenges are throwbacks to Matt’s old games. (Sadly, we’ve been told there will not be a kart racing level, but my next hypothesis is mythical beasts, from Matt’s hit, Conflict of the Deities.)

The game mechanics are pretty much what you would expect from a cover-based third person shooter, but perhaps more accessible. For example, the Point and Cover system makes it really easy to dodge between covered locations, since you can just aim your reticule at your next spot, and hit Y to move. No fumbling around to see if you’re stuck to the wall or not. The Vicious Engine provides physics, and of course, there are interactive environmental tidbits, like fire extinguishers you can shoot to explode.

One cool thing to watch for is how enemies “de-rez” in a cloud of blue pixels instead of die in a more traditional sense. Matt can actually absorb some of this data to get new powers. If he nicks the six shooter ability from a cowboy, for instance, he’ll be able to dual wield pistols that obviously aren’t as powerful as a magnum, but they make up for it by stunning.

Since the game is clearly personality driven, it seems fitting that D3 has gotten two rad personalities to lend voice talent to the main characters. Will Arnet (Arrested Development, 30 Rock) will be playing Matt Hazard, and Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, and yes, Doogie Howser, M.D.) gets to be evil again in the role of Wallis Wesley III.

I’m definitely looking forward to more news about Matt Hazard. I love the totally meta plotline (not to mention the elaborate backstory they’ve created) and it’ll be interesting to see what sorts of parodies will appear. Q1 gets closer everyday, but in the meantime you can follow this goofy blog (seriously cracks me up sometimes) and “reminisce” over on Facebook.

• D3 “Announces” Classic Matt Hazard Coming to XBLA & PSN
• Denied Down Under: Dark Sector Banned In Australia Due To Excessive Violence

When Neil Gaiman’s young adult novel, Coraline, hits the big screens in February, it will be accompanied by videogame for Wii, PS2, and DS.

The videogame iteration will obviously not be painstakingly done in stop-motion animation, nor shot with stereoscopic 3-D in mind, but the console versions will contain unlcockable full motion video clips. As is often the case with tie-ins, the plot follows the book/movie, but will also allow players to explore further.

The story of Coraline begins with the thusly named bored girl who, having just moved from Pontiac, MI to Portland, OR, doesn’t have many friends. Her parents are busy and pay little attention to her, so when she finds a little door that leads to a mirror version of the world where her life rocks and everyone is nice to her (despite their creepy button eyes), she spends as much time there as she can.

Unfortunately, when she goes to sleep, however, she is transported back to reality. Of course, in the end, the Otherworld isn’t perfect, either, and there are probably wholesome lessons to be learned. (I’ll have to read the book before the movie comes out…)

Gameplay-wise you can expect an action adventure with some light puzzle elements—think strategic sling shooting and crate stacking. Buttons serve as currency, which makes you wonder which Otherworlders have lost their eyes!

They weren’t really demoing the game as much as announcing it and showing us some behind the scenes clips from the movie, so it’s hard to say exactly what to expect. I have a feeling it will be more exciting as a film, but with inspired level design, it could be fun to interact with the Coraline’s Otherworld.

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20,000 years in the future mega corporations control the galaxy–and we mean the whole galaxy! There will be a lot of sci-fi flavored puzzle questing to be had, via many warp gates, when Puzzle Quest: Galactrix drops in Q1 of next year for XBLA, DS, and PC.

If you missed our E3 hands-on, check that out, but read on for an updated impression and a few details on crafting and other mini-games.

There are over 150 items in the game, and one way to attain them is through crafting. This mini-game uses the same (i.e. new) hexagonal grid set-up, with tiles that refresh depending on which way you drag them to match, but you’ll be matching color coded materials in order to create specific parts listed in the upper right of the screen.

Hacking, on the other hand, tasks you with making your matches based on the colors that come up, and mining is all about collecting cargo (the materials you’ll need for crafting.) The two other mini-games are haggling (which we’ve been told is pretty tricky, but worth the resulting price drop) and getting rumors off of moons (I guess maybe there isn’t much to do on a satellite but gossip?)

I will admit that matching hexagons is a bit harder than columns and rows. You have to remember that the game is looking for a straight line, and not just three that are touching. That said, the science fiction plot looks cool enough (and flying your fleet around on the overworld screen, even if only your main ship is visible) that this learning curve should not pose a threat to anyone’s anticipation.

• Xbox Live Prices Go Up Despite Decline in Metacritic Scores (XBLA)
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It’s not a teddy bear, it’s a dog! Ok, yeah, the puppy is sporting an anthropomorphic tummy like a teddy bear would, and the overall effect is very similar, but even I can tell the difference! On the whole, though, I think I prefer the son in his school uniform, but the ears are so cute!

Welcome to the character selection screen in Family Party: 30 Great Games. Not only is it a party game for you to play with you family, it’s a party game to play as a bunch of cute blood-relative (or at least adopted) characters.

You can play up to six minigames in a session, so we piled a few up and got right to it. Our first event was an obstacle race where the by-now-commonplace method of Wii minigame running (shaking the remote) is used between smashing through walls with the B button or jumping over water with A.

Less frantic was a game called Bombardment Bridge, where we took turns tapping the 2 button to walk across a bridge with a shield (to be tactically deployed to the right or left by tilting) while other players sniped from a distance.

Inner Clock made me instantly put the Go Byou Man song in my head, keeping me from correctly guessing when the invisible timer had reached 20 seconds. By the time you have to count to thirty, it gets a little boring…

Luckily we were on to the next game, which had us once again running and jumping, except this time we also had to crawl beneath nets by holding A and B while jabbing the remote back and forth like a saw.

Survival Rope was by far the most amusing, even if it was tricky and went on a bit long. The idea is to flick the remote to jump rope, but the twirlers vary the speed so it can be hard to keep up at times. Watching all four players fall flat on their faces simultaneously cracked us up enough to make it worthwhile.

Finally, our last event: Balance Bridge. Another one where you’re tapping to cross a bridge, but this time you’ll have to tilt the remote against the tilt of the bridge itself. I managed to get by without falling off at all.

That’s a taste of six out of the 30 games. Like most titles of this sort, the fun is really who you’re playing with and teasing each other when you mess up. Whether you’re up for another mini-game collection or not in the first place is the real question, but this one comes conveniently priced ($19.99) in time for the holidays. For the gamer gamers on your shopping list, it might not be the thing, but for the people who aren’t sure what to do post-Wii Sports, this could be a decent expansion.

• Let’s Tap For The Wii Turns Finger Drumming Into A Game That Has Nothing To Do With Finger Drumming
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Rome wasn’t built in a day, it was built over 100 levels of match-three, casual yet crack-like gaming frenzy! At least, that’s the case in D3 Publisher’s Cradle of Rome, where you’ll take the city from a field to the ancient capital decked out with famous landmarks such as the Parthenon and Coliseum.

There are two objectives in every level: to clear the blue “gate” tiles in order to advance, and to collect resources. In the first level, all you can get is gold (by matching three gold tiles à la Bejeweled) but once you can afford a sawmill, for example, you’ll be able to store wood as well. Then once you have enough gold and wood, you can buy a quarry to acquire stone.

There are six epochs in the game to work your way through, but I was assured the pacing is good enough that you shouldn’t feel like you need to grind a ton if you play with an average balance of harvesting and gate clearing.

The boards start out pretty simple, but obviously get a lot more complex as you go–later levels can take 30-40 minutes to finish, partially due to chained tiles that take multiple matches to clear. Don’t let the timer run out!

Luckily, as you progress you’ll unlock different tools to use for special effects, like a bomb that will explode a 3×3 grid, lightening that strikes ten random tiles, or a shield that takes out a whole row. Each stage randomly selects one power-up to feature on the board so that matching 3 of those tiles will refill that tool’s meter. Since your meter statuses carry over from stage to stage, it’s important not to blow them all in one place.

Clearly, Cradle of Rome is taking cues from Puzzle Quest, but it seems a lot less involved, as it’s not a full-on RPG. Still quite addicting, nonetheless; for $19.99, it may be worth zoning out with once it ships November 18.

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Thursday night Blue Omega showed off their vertically bent steampunk shooter, Damnation, to the press at Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco. After loitering a bit in a pseudo-secret side room (the venue is prohibition-era themed) we settled in to the Xbox 360 system-link set-up in a semi-adjoining back room, where the fuse promptly blew…

But we eventually did get to play the game, and I quite enjoyed it! My first round was King of the Hill in a warehouse-y sort of environment. You notice the height immediately, and notice it head-on if you take the stairs a bit quickly and rely on a railing that doesn’t exist.

You have to sort of suspend your belief a bit when it comes to the utility of the structure—why would anyone build a tower that requires dive rolls over pits of doom to scale? But aside from falling to your doom, it’s pretty fun to wall jump over to a ladder hanging from a platform and clamber up, climb your way to the glowing blue “hill,” and blast away the King and posers alike.

Controls were pretty standard for a third-person shooter, but the gameplay depends a lot more on platforming skills than most. The sprint button was really handy, especially for escaping those horrible HORRIBLE PEOPLE (which, yes, included me from time to time) taking advantage of the (probably) overpowered melee punch.

Actually, there were quite a few unintentionally hilarious fist fights during the evening—people chasing each other like a dog after its tail, four man clusterfreak. However, the level designs are conducive to awesome sniping opportunities as well, and the range of weaponry will allow for both running in with a Tommy-gun styled automatic or hiding out for longer range tactics.

After taking a death match spin through a more outdoor environment, I ended up sampling the evening’s titular cocktail (which was rather a bit like spiked apple cider, and pretty damned—hurr–delicious) with producer Richard Gilbert. He caught me up on details like how the story mode is co-op from start to end, with the second player controlling various supporting characters as they weave through the plot, and how Blue Omega is aiming to create an American epic in the same way that Lord of the Rings could be considered a European epic. I’m totally into the idea of an Americana-marinated, steam-powered, alternate history tale (and I really liked that cowboy I was running around with), so I’ll have my eye on Damnation when it releases this winter.

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You know what makes me happy? Quality 2-D animation instead of crummy 3-D.

So even though I may not be a Ben 10 super-fan (read: I’ve never watched the Cartoon Network series, a sequel set five years after the original Ben 10 show, where Ben comes out of Omnitrix retirement to save his missing Grandpa by transforming into a new bunch of aliens with superpowers…) I can appreciate the look and feel of Ben 10 Alien Force for DS.

The new game is being released for a PlayStation, PSP, Wii, and DS which will all have five new alien forms, like Humongosaur, a big humanoid dinosaur, for Ben to take advantage of, but the DS version has three exclusives, like Echo Echo, who may be short, but has a move where he stacks up copies of himself for a triple punch.

Transforming is really easy, since all you need to do is use the shoulder buttons to choose the form you want, and then tap it on the touch screen. If you fight effectively and collect a lot of Omnitrix points, you can upgrade six different areas (max health, combos) for each form from the menu screen between levels.

While it seems like a pretty typical beat’em up platformer, Ben 10 Alien Force looks to be a good use of the license, and also something that the target audience should enjoy quite a bit. I can imagine legions of happy elementary school-aged nephews toting this in their Ben 10 backpacks once it releases October 28.

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Aux hai! Just here to prove that viral marketing works by making sure you’ve seen this nifty Wario Land: Shake It! promotion on YouTube. It’s more fun if I don’t tell you all about it, so just click the link already!

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To cease our pining for Wee awesomeness between now and the launch of the DS tower defense game Ninjatown, SouthPeak Games provides us with the Wee Ninjatron. The best part about it, though–the stroke of sheer genius– is that after you’re done picking the facial expression, clothing, and accessories of your Wee Ninja, you get to mad lib together a Legend detailing key biographical information. Link us to your creations in the comments section. I want to see more ninjas!

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You know, I kinda like Infinite Undiscovery. Despite being the “latest” from Square Enix and tri-Ace, it is not the “greatest,” and when I started playing I was sort of disappointed.

Though it sets aside the old school menus in favor of a more active, action-RPG style of gameplay, I found the Connect Action system clumsy and the on-the-fly inventory navigation an unmitigated hassle. As neat as it is to be assisted by your party members, battles often turn into a button-mashing “clusterfight”. I could go on complaining (and probably will) but I still kinda like Infinite Undiscovery. How can this be?

You play as Capell, a scaredy-cat flautist who is continually mistaken for Lord Sigmund, the “Liberator,” the breaker of chains. Chains? Yeah–they’re attached to the moon. The Order of Chains is pretty into that, for whatever reason, even though it’s sapping the planet’s energy.

Of course, it could have something to do with lunaglyphs, which allow those who are not without one (and thus “unblessed,” like Capell) to wield magical power. After being inadvertently busted out of prison by a cute girl named Aya (she thought he was Sigmund), Capell ends up joining the Liberator and his Force on their quest to free the planet.

There’s a lot going on in this game, but it makes sense to talk about combat first. Sometimes you’ll fight in a party of four, sometimes in two or three parties of four, but you’ll always be in control of Capell. I like the way he dashes in to a target once the reticule turns red, and the system for ambushing enemies is great, except when they ambush you and all their hits are critical.

Capell can take advantage of his immediate teammates via the Connect Action system. Connecting gives you access to ranged attacks, super powerful moves, a few buffs, and even a ride on Aya’s giant bear. Unfortunately, pressing the right bumper, choosing your connection, and finally deciding what moves to use is a bit putzy—especially since you have to be wary of enemies, and it deprives you of one of the most important and frustrating buttons in the game—Y.

Y is used to request healing, something you apparently can’t do when you’re shooting Aya’s bow or having Edward step in to work that huge sword of his. Not that it always succeeds anyways, but it’s usually responsive enough until Capell dies. Then, even though there may be a pile of Miraculous Medicines (read: Phoenix Downs) in the inventory, no one will help you. I swear they use items on each other, and sometimes even on you—just not reliably. The spottiness can be maddening, especially since when Capell falls and the others are still alive, shaded black bars close in on the screen, leaving a window of opportunity (presumably) for someone to save you.

In addition to non-random encounters, you’ll cross paths with plenty of bosses, but also some timed battles or special events, like the initial escape from the ogre in the prison. Often, these types of situations carry “Situation Bonuses” based often on the time it takes to complete them.

Shopping for increasingly expensive and powerful gear is a pastime everyone can enjoy, but you can also stock up on a mind-numbing variety of healing items for very specialized occasions. This would be fine except you can really only feasibly access your inventory without dying after a fight ends, since the game doesn’t pause for you to menu dive.

Other items include materials for the superfluous crafting system. At least, I wouldn’t miss it. Each character specializes in cooking, forging weapons, or writing music for Capell to play, but this feature wasn’t really interesting enough to warrant a ton of time investment unless you’re really so much of a completist.

All the environments in the game look great, whether you’re in a super ornate palace or just a bunch of sand dunes. Each areas seems to have its own twist. Switch puzzles, warps, spider web bridges—rarely do you come upon a zone without some sort of gimmick. My favorite gimmick, however, is the pervasive use of Capell’s Percipere song to uncover hidden items. I even hear the wavering sound that accompanies the hazy patch of air while walking down the street, now…

So if I feel like the gameplay has some obnoxious-but-not-game-breaking flaws, why did I feel compelled to keep playing and even hand-draw a map of the beautiful yet damnable Cobasna Timberlands? Besides the awesome soundtrack, what stood out for me the most above everything else in this game are the character designs—and there are so many characters!

From the first time I saw Aya’s freckles, months ago, I knew that I would be completely charmed by the art direction. The outfits, the faces, the animation— and even though the facial expressions aren’t perfect, they add a lot. I only wish the Japanese voices would’ve been included (but I suppose the game is two disks as it is…)

In the end, I’d have to recommend Infinite Undiscovery as a rental first. There is a strong possibility that you, too, will be enticed by the excellent graphics (despite, yes, the bit of unfortunate slowdown during hectic battles) and the story of lunar disenchainment, but there is a sadly equal possibility that the combat system will just not jive with your gameplay tastes.

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