61 Frames Per Second

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• Namco, Why You Gotta Make Me Hit You: Sonic Co-Creator’s Unnecessary Pac-Man “Comeback”

  Namco has hired Hirokazu Yasuhara to create a new Pac-Man to celebrate the little yellow glutton’s 30th anniversary in 2010. Namco chief of operations Makoto Iwai told Gamasutra that they’re making the game as a comeback vehicle for Pac-Man, to try and make him a relevant icon in today’s game market. When it comes to making great character-based games, you can’t do much better than Yasuhara. Yuji Naka’s gotten most of the glory, but Yasuhara was the real brains behind Sonic the Hedgehog’s glory days. He acted as director for the original Sonic trilogy on Genesis, was lead designer for Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, and headed up Sonic’s unfinished Saturn debut, Sonic Extreme. After leaving Sega, he joined Naughty Dog and acted as a designer for Jak 2 and 3 as well as Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. That right there is a flawless pedigree, a veritable trail of excellence blazed across a decade and a half. Why in the hell has this man been hired to make Pac-Man relevant again when Pac-Man’s creator already did just that two years ago? Someone please tell me how it makes sense to hire one of the best platformer designers of all time to make a freaking Pac-Man game? History has shown that a Pac-Man platformer is a terrible, terrible idea. Oh, you don't remember? Read More... Posted Mar 06 2009, 07:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, pac-man, gamasutra, sega, sonic the hedgehog, genesis, namco, Saturn, sonic 3, sonic 2, sonic & knuckles, Pac-man championship edition, toru iwatani, sonic extreme, hirokazu yasuhara, pac-man world, tycho brahe, pac-land, pac-man 2

• A Semi-Reasoned Analysis of the Used Game Conundrum

  Over at Gamasutra, Frontier Developments' David Braben talks about the resale market. I think he has a realistic perspective, a welcome change from the whiny, ranty position that some developers often take. "...we don't see anything from the used-game sales, which is one reason why the price of new games throughout the industry remains artificially high," he says. "I mean, the industry has to make all its money from the first sale since we don't get a penny from the subsequent dozen or so sales of that same game." First of all, in a free market there is no such thing as "artificially high" prices. The games are sold at whatever the consumer is willing to pay. This is the invisible hand at work, people.  Gaming analyst at-large Michael Pachter knows what's up: "The only real meaningful threat," says Pachter, "is for publishers to stop supplying GameStop with packaged products. And, so far, nobody has made that threat. But, frankly, if it's not [Electronic Arts CEO] John Riccitiello or [Activision CEO] Bobby Kotick, it doesn't really matter. The other guys don't matter. I mean no disrespect to anyone else, but who cares what anyone else thinks?" Read More... Posted Dec 15 2008, 03:00 PM by Cole Stryker with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: gamasutra, michael pachter, cole stryker, gamestop

• Street Fighter IV’s Fighting Spirit, In Painstaking Detail

  In the year since Street Fighter IV was first announced, producer Yoshi Ono has been spreading the good news, making sure that every gamer, and not just fighting enthusiasts, knew about Street Fighter’s glorious return to the world stage. It’s rare that even a few weeks have gone by, especially following EGM’s exclusive cover story on SFIV last December, without Ono sitting down with journalists across the world to discuss the game’s ongoing development and refinement on the road to its release this past summer. But excitement for Street Fighter IV, at least in the United States where only a scant few imported arcade cabinets are available to players, is at a perilous stage, somewhere between tense excitement and frustrated impatience. We’re ready to fight, and even though the fall gaming season is just swinging into gear, it’s hard to ignore Street Fighter IV’s absence from the landscape. To tide over the faithful, Brandon Sheffield’s interview with ubiquitous Ono running on Gamasutra today has some of the deepest insights into SFIV’s structure yet to be published. The familiar territory of how SFIV has been built to bring casual players back into the fold is covered well here, but filtered through the perspective of the fighting genre’s most technical aspects. Ono also provides some fascinating perspective on the series’ history, particularly fighter’s-fighter Street Fighter III and why it’s taken some twelve years for that title to gain the respect and audience it has always deserved: Read More... Posted Sep 26 2008, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, gamasutra, street fighter, capcom, yoshi ono

• Men Are From Hyrule, Women Are From Simville: If Gender Defines the Games We Play, Why Does Everyone Play By the Same Rules?

  The problem with working on the internet is that you inevitably find yourself plummeting down some horrible information vortex while trying to be productive. It could be some hyperlinked sentence in a Newsweek article or that godforsaken new email icon popping up on your screen, but no matter the form it comes in, your cognitive process is sent down the road of endless consumption, natural curiosity leading you by the nose, sniffing out even more useless information. Today, Pete Smith sent me a nugget of knowledge from the Wikipedia entry on game addiction and, so, I fell down the information rabbit hole. Somehow I missed this back at the end of May, but Professor Allan Reiss of Stanford University published a study on the effects of videogames on male and female brains. The experiment entailed monitoring a number of men and women’s brain functions while playing a simple strategy game; players gained control of territory from other players by clicking on dots on a screen. MRI scans of the players’ brains, both male and female, showed activation of the mesocorticolimbic centre, that lovely chunk of grey matter associated with addiction and reward. The scans, however, showed more activity in the mesocorticolimbic centre in men than in women. Reiss’ conclusion was that this explained men having greater interest in the common videogame, one in which territory is at stake, than women. I find the Professor’s findings damned peculiar in light of the most successful PC game in all of history. Read More... Posted Sep 12 2008, 01:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, gamasutra, resident evil, the sims, nintendogs, bejeweled

• Interview Round Up: Suda 51, Shinji Mikami, and Mikami’s Replacements on Resident Evil

  This is what happens when Shinji Mikami and Suda 51 work together. The greatest interviews in the gaming world can’t all come from 61 Frames Per Second, dontcha know! While we’ve been chatting with the OCRemix crew about Street Fighter II HD Remix, Gamasutra’s Christian Nutt has been chatting with director Yasuhiro Anpo and producer Jun Takeuchi of Capcom about their controversial sequel, Resident Evil 5. Read More... Posted Aug 15 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: gamasutra, ea, shinji mikami, resident evil, 1up, grasshopper, jun takeuchi, suda 51, killer 7

• Follow Up: Mega Man 9 and Design Resurrection Part 2

  We have, for all intents and purposes, run out of ways to ask the team behind Capcom’s impending return to simpler times, Mega Man 9, what their inspiration and goals are. It’s been damn well covered in the past month. Keiji Inafune, Capcom, and Inti Creates wanted to get back to the serie's roots. They wanted to give something special back to the fans. They want to see if they can best Mega Man 2. The journalistic soil, as it were, has been tilled. But it would seem that the team has not exhausted their supply of interesting answers to the questions. Christian Nutt ran an excellent interview with Mega Man 9 producer Hirnobu Takeshita yesterday that covered much of the same territory but revealed two fascinating tidbits about the game. The first is that, though the game looks, sounds, and gives a solid impression of being a bonafide NES game, it isn’t one. It is, according to Takeshita, “too big”. The most exciting part of the interview, though, comes later when Nutt asks how far the team has gone to emulate an NES-style game. Read More... Posted Aug 05 2008, 10:00 AM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, gamasutra, capcom, mega man

• Karateka Remake in the Works

  File this one under "unexpected". Gamasutra reports that Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner is planning to bring back the lesser known 1984 proto-brawler Karateka, though "not in the way we'd expect." During the interview, Mechner related this amazing easter egg from the original Apple II version of the game: The programmer doing copy protection for the game figured out that by messing with the bit table, the whole game could be played upside down, which is really hard to do. We thought it would be hilarious if we burned the flipped version of the game to the other side of the disk. We figured of all the people who buy the game, a couple of them would accidentally put the floppy in upside down. That way, when that person calls tech support, that tech support rep would once in blue moon have the sublime joy of saying, 'Well sir, you put the disk in upside down,' and that person would think for the rest of their life that's how software works.   Read More... Posted Jul 28 2008, 04:00 PM by Cole Stryker with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: gamasutra, prince of persia, cole stryker, apple ii, karateka, easter egg

• End Game: The Necessary Evil of Boss Fights

  Warning! Danger! Other exclamations accompanied by loud noises and/or flashing lights on-screen! The boss fight is a staple of single and co-operative multiplayer game design, instances placed throughout a game to act as a final and extreme test of a player’s skill at a given game’s rule set. In his expert dissection of boss fight design over at Gamasutra, Nayan Ramachandran uses the metaphor of pedagogical structure to describe the roll of boss confrontations in gaming: Games in which bosses appear have levels that are usually designed like a traditional class syllabus. If you were to liken the the length of a game’s level to a semester of studying, learning the game’s boundaries and mechanics and the flaws of the enemies it throws at you, then surely the boss is the final exam for the class. Testing the skills you’ve learned on your journey to this powerful character, as well as the powers and weapons you’ve collected over time, the boss character is meant to be a milestone of achievement for the player. It offers structure where there might not be any. It is the personification of a climax. Ramachandran predominantly uses examples and forms culled from action based gaming to examine the form but boss confrontations cross most game genres. Read More... Posted Jun 18 2008, 10:00 AM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, gamasutra, mario, halo, boss, bowser, Nayan Ramachandran

• Bringing Sexy Back: Susan O’Connor

  Back in the day, Hooksexup had a motto: Good writing is sexy. In the past ten years, as Hooksexup’s grown out of its spunky, firebrand early days and into its current incarnation as a mature, established purveyor of cultural commentary, the motto has disappeared from the magazine. But it lives on in everything we do. Good writing being sexy is a belief we cannot shake, a universal truth that colors all of our endeavors, and it’s at the heart of 61 Frames Per Second. Painful as it is to say, good writing is still rare in games. Dialogue, expository text, all writing really, takes a backseat to the creation of every other asset in a game. Hell, in some cases, I’ve seen promotional materials better written than the game they’re humping (I’m looking at you Metroid Prime 3. Suburban Commando called, it wants its dialogue back.) That’s why Susan O’Connor is sexy. Recently named one of the most important women in games, the fact of the matter is that O’Connor is one of the most important people working in games, period. Read More... Posted May 28 2008, 10:00 AM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, metroid, gamasutra, bioshock, bringing sexy back, susan o'connor, gears of war

• Happiness in Videogames: The Importance of Being Earnest

  Lorenzo Wang, designer of Page 44 Studio’s trick-dirt-biking game Freakstyle, has been thinking about happiness. More specifically, he’s been thinking about the recent work of people like Daniel Gilbert and Jennifer Michael Hecht and their new insights into just how human happiness works. In his new essay, The Pursuit of Games: Designing Happiness, Wang applies these new theories of happiness to making good games and the result is a set of design maxims that every developer should take to heart. To clarify, happiness does not denote fun. As Wang puts it, “Happiness comes from the resolution of anger, ennui, fear, frustration, insecurities, and unimportance. Pleasure is an immediate, short-term rush, often visceral, and designers usually to call it ‘fun.’ You can have one without the other.” Read More... Posted May 27 2008, 01:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, gamasutra, final fantasy, jennifer michael hecht, daniel gilbert, happiness

• She’s a La-day, Whoa Whoa Whoa: The Top Twenty Women in Games

  New York’s own Bonnie Ruberg, of the always riveting, titillating, and expertly written Heroine Sheik blog, has put up one of the most important lists to hit the net in quite some time. Do you understand what I’m saying, dear reader? The internet is over sixty percent lists! Along with Brenda Brathwaite and Sheri Graner Ray, Ruberg has put together a look at the top twenty most important women in games today. While the list spotlights some of the more recognizable female faces in the industry like Bioshock scribe Susan O’Connor and Miss Braithwaite herself, the list celebrates others who don’t often pop up in the press. Laura Fryer, Robin Hunicke, Brenda Laurel, and every other one of the remarkable women on this list: 61 Frames Per Second salutes you! Hit the jump for more. Read More... Posted May 21 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, gamasutra, street fighter, brenda brathwaite, susan o'connor, bonnie ruberg, igda, odin sphere, heroine sheik

• Film to Games: Ghostbusters is the Beginning of a (Hopefully) Beautiful Friendship

  Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. Time was that the relationship between film and videogames was one of extremes: games poached the narrative framing devices of film in an effort to grow as a medium and film poached the intellectual properties of games to make garbage movies and a quick buck. However, this relationship is morphing into something far more powerful: artistic collaboration. Even beyond Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s consulting work on titles like Boom Blox and King Kong, filmmakers and game designers are now working directly with one another to produce videogames with sophisticated design alongside the sophisticated so often missing in games. Terminal Reality’s upcoming Ghostbusters game, a true sequel to 1989’s Ghostbusters 2, is going to be one of the first games to truly benefit from this crossover. Not only have all the principal characters agreed to resume their roles, but Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis are penning the script themselves. In an interview with our esteemed colleagues over at Gamasutra, Terminal Reality president Mark Randel discusses the benefits of partnering directly with the creators to produce superior work. Read More... Posted May 19 2008, 10:00 AM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, boom blox, steven spielberg, gamasutra, games to film, Ghostbusters, n’gai croal, cory barlog, peter Jackson, dan ackroyd, george miller, Harold ramis

• Actraiser III! Maybe!

  Nothing Square-Enix could announce would make me happier than a sequel to ActRaiser, their seminal 1991 genre-bender. Back in the early days of the SNES, ActRaiser was one of the first games that felt genuinely next-generation. Mario World was great, but, well, it was Mario. ActRaiser, with its dense forests, poisoned lakes and vast deserts, was a window onto a gorgeous natural world that older game systems only had the power to imply. And the soundtrack kicked fucking ass. Read More... Posted May 13 2008, 11:30 AM by Peter Smith with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: peter smith, gamasutra, jeremy parish, final fantasy crystal chronicles, toshihiro tsuchida, fumiaki shiraishi, actraiser, actraiser 2, simcity

• Hiroshi Yamauchi Gots to Get Paid

  The business of videogames isn’t especially interesting at first glance. But when you realize that many, many of the leading businessmen in the industry are completely bonkers, it’s hard not to pay attention. Forbes brought one of my own personal heroes back into the limelight last Wednesday when they announced that Hiroshi Yamauchi is now the richest man in Japan! Yamauchi is the former president of Nintendo and was single handedly responsible for turning the former playing card manufacturer into the gaming juggernaut they are today. But ol’ uncle Hiroshi was even better known for saying batshit crazy things in public. Here’s a classic: "If the (Nintendo) DS succeeds, we will rise to heaven, but if it fails we will sink to hell." Read More... Posted May 12 2008, 11:00 AM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, hiroshi yamauchi, nintendo ds, gamasutra