Making a game that stands the test of time and can endure for multiple generations is a challenge.  The rules you use to create the game define how it is played.  Sometimes they’re good enough to last, and sometimes you need to update them as the game and the players evolve.

In the case of sports, sometimes the equipment gets better, and sometimes the players get better.  International Football is no exception, and as many people have noted during this past World Cup, something needs to change.  The rules are no longer adequate for the way the teams have been playing.  Two teams were outright eliminated due to bad calls, and team USA had its share of egregious and ridiculous calls against them as well.  A lot of people blame bad officiating (and I’m in no way saying there wasn’t), but if we take the time to examine how the game is being played, I think we’ll see that the rules in place now are outdated, and are actually encouraging the type of play which creates an environment for biased or bad calls.

The game is plagued by bad acting on the part of players trying to draw fouls from the referees, because free kicks (especially direct free kicks) mean a chance for a set play or a good percentage shot on goal.  There is a secondary reason for acting injured, and that’s to delay the game and burn up the clock, because the clock isn’t stopped in FIFA football.  Two rule changes and a feature update would completely clean up the game and encourage better play and more aggressive goal scoring.

Stop the Clock.

There’s absolutely no reason not to.  Every other international professional level sport which has a league will stop the clock when necessary.  Sure, there’s “extra time” awarded at the end of a match; I guess the referee has a stopwatch or keeps track in his head about how much time was wasted on the pitch, and then awards an even number of minutes at the end of the match.  This is a horrible implementation and creates an unfair environment for everyone to play in.  The amount of time wasted during the match never matches the amount of time the referee awards, and then there’s the problem of stoppage time during Extra Time, and you wind up with five minutes on the Extra Time clock when only three minutes were awarded.  Players have no idea how much time is really left in the match, and when the whistle finally blows to end the match, it’s the most anticlimactic ending in all of sports.

With no reasonable expectation for how much time is left (when the clock says 35 in the 2nd period, does that mean there are ten or fifteen minutes left in a match?), players don’t know how hard to push themselves.  They don’t know if they should risk pushing the ball forward one last time because there’s only twenty seconds left to play, or if they should use an outlet pass out to a midfielder to guarantee posession and regroup for another strike, because hey, maybe there’s still a minute or three left.  Moreover, the ref might actually be giving one team preferential treatment by thinkin “well it’s time but I’ll just blow the whistle after this last chance on goal here.”  Who would want to play in a system like that?

Stop the clock, and you’ll see the level of play go up, and you’ll see the drama of trying to run the clock out go way down.  You can’t run out a clock that stops for an injury or a downed player on the field.  The technology has been in place for over forty years to stop the clock.  It’s about time football leapt into the modern era and adopted it.

Change how Penalties are Given

The acting has gotten so bad that players are now giving up valid scoring opportunities in a desperate attempt to draw a foul in the penalty box.  This is just stupid.  They only do it because a penalty kick has a high percentage of going in as opposed to taking a shot during regular play.  There’s a very simple way to fix this; to encourage shots on goal and playing through a foul instead of taking a dive.

Start using a Delayed Penalty.

You can see delayed penalties in sports like Basketball or Hockey.  The idea is that you notate that a foul has occurred, but you don’t stop play.  If the player who was fouled was in possession of the ball, and he retains possession despite the foul, then play continues until:

1. He loses possession, or
2. He scores.

If he loses possession, take the ball back to the point of the infraction, and spot the ball where you would have by the old rules, and allow the free kick/penalty kick to happen.

This encourages play, not acting.  With a delayed penalty, you’d be an idiot for not playing through the foul and taking a dive.  You get two chances to score instead of one, and the game and the fans are rewarded with better play.  Imagine how much more exciting it would be to see a player who is tripped while entering the penalty box run through the foul and take a shot on goal anyway instead of going down to the turf hoping to guarantee drawing the foul.

After a year of this kind of rule in place, players who are almost fouled would stop taking a dive to the pitch, because they’d have mentally trained themselves to play through a foul in order to gain the double opportunity.  I’d think you’d see the drama drop off dramatically.

Unfortunately, I doubt FIFA would ever adopt either of these rule changes.  Hell, we’ll be lucky if they start using instant replay to validate offsides or fouls on goals being scored.

So HP recently developed a smart web cam that will track your face as you move around a room (I don’t know, don’t ask me, maybe some people do web conferencing/skype/nudie cam while standing up).  It works really really great!

If you’re not black.

I guess the HP techs designed it to look for contrasts between your nose, cheek bones, and eyes, but the camera lacks the ability/resolution to detect that on a black person.

So how does this apply to video games, you ask?  Because as game developers, we’ve learned that you don’t make a product/game/application for yourself.  You make it for the demographic you’re designing it for (kids, Moms, hardcore gamers, casual web development, etc.).  You need to test it using your core demographic, because if you don’t, you’re only designing it for yourself.  I’m working on a longer post regarding this design philosophy, so hopefully we’ll see that go up later this week.  But in the meantime, let’s enjoy the HP engineering fail, shall we?  How much do you want to bet that the entire HP design/engineering/tech team that worked on this didn’t have a single black guy on it?

That you’ll never play.*

Awhile ago Justin Keverne wrote a piece, the Taxonomy of Left 4 Dead, which compared the characters in L4D to the MUD definitions of online game players set forth by Richard A. Bartle.  It’s a pretty insightful piece, pointing out that the characters emulate the four different type of players (Bill is the Achiever, Zoey the Socializer, Francis the Killer, and Louis the Explorer).  Go read it, then come back here.  You’ll be glad you did.

One of the things that struck me about the piece after reading it, is that there’s a bit of disconnect in the idea that I can be a Bill player (Achiever), but 3/4 of the time, I can’t play as Bill.  Someone else has already logged on and “stole” him before I could get there and pick “my guy.”  (For the record I like playing Louis just because he cracks me up).  So the majority of the time I’m playing, there’s a disconnect between my personality and the character I’m forced to play.  I’m playing against type.

So, I wondered if I couldn’t fix that.

Using Keverne’s character definitions (which were based on Bartle’s) as a starting point, and projecting them onto the characters of Left4Dead, I wondered if I couldn’t create a Personality Mod for L4D.  How could we reward the multiplayer personalities of Achiever, Killer, Socializer, and Explorer, or in the worst case, force players to play with these goals in mind?

First, I’d need to make it so that there were 4 alts of each of the four main characters.  This way, if four people wanted to play as Francis, they could.  This at least alleviates the “identity” issue I raised earlier with Left4Dead, where I never can play with the character I want to.  If we wanted to make it more “real” (so we didn’t have some alternate reality with four identical Francis’s walking around with different clothing), we could easily make four characters who are very similar iconically to Francis.  Be they Black, or Asian, or whatever, you’d have the equivalent of a Biker Gang of Francises, a VFW of Bills, a chatty social clique of Zoeys, and a nervous office pool of Louises.

Second, for this mod to work, there needs to be a new rule implemented regarding weapon pickups, and that is that there can now only be one of each weapon, bottle of pills, or health packs in the world.  If someone picks a shotgun up off of a table, the shotgun is now gone from the table.  All objects will work this way (I think health packs already work this way), for reasons that you will see later.  Ammunition will still be an infinite spawn pile where they’re found currently in levels.

Next, I’d explore giving each of the character social classes actual character traits which would reward (or force) the player’s natural social gaming traits.  This was the heart of the challenge; can we create a class based system based on personality behaviors, rather than just pure Strength/Health/Damage stats?

Starting with Francis, we must reward The Killer.  He gains his largest bonuses to accuracy and damage with the Shotgun.  He also gains smaller bonuses to the assault rifle.  However, this comes at a price.  As we all know, Francis hates everything (and presumably everyone).  For this reason, he’s a bit of a loner.  He cannot be healed refuses to be healed by anyone in the party, and refuses all offers of pills and weapons, choosing to go it alone.  He can heal himself, however, and as he is The Killer, he’s tougher than the rest of the group, and gets a boost in health to 125.

Zoey is The Socializer.  She gains a 25% boost to healing others (but not herself), and can choose how much health to give others from any given health pack (stopping the healing animation at 50% does not revert healing; it instead gives the target player 50% of that health pack).  As Zoey is smaller than everyone else, she has less total health, coming in at 75 hit points.  However, as she is The Socializer, if she is within 10 feet of any other survivor, she gains 1% of her health back per second.  Big weapons are a problem for Zoey due to her size, so she has less accuracy with anything larger than the SMG.  But to make up for this, she is proficient with her favorite pistols and gains an accuracy and damage boost when using them.

Louis, being The Explorer, needs to be rewarded for his adventurous and curious nature.  Louis starts with 88 hit points, and he gains 1% of his health back per second if he is more than 10 feet away from any other survivor.  His other Explorer trait is that if he is completely alone (i.e. can’t be seen by any other survivor), he gains a 10% chance to find a small item that wasn’t available to the other survivors (such as pills or pipe bombs or a pistol).  He likes pills more than any other survivor, and so he starts with an effectiveness bonus the first time he uses them.  On first use, the pills last 25% longer than usual.  Every subsequent use, they lose 5% of their duration, until he reaches -25% of their useful duration, for the life of the campaign.

The Achiever is probably the most problematic one to think of as a personality.  Bill’s pretty cut and dry.  I was originally tempted just to leave him alone, as a sort of control group, but there’s no fun in that.  So to reward an achiever, Bill will gain objects and item bonuses whenever the party accomplishes the impossible.  Did the party kill a Witch?  Bill suddenly has an extra health pack to hand out or use that he forgot about.  Did a Tank just die?  Hey, check it out, Bill found some more Molotov cocktails!  Or possibly whenever these obstacles are overcome, or if a checkpoint is reached in a level (you know them when you hit them) if a player comes within 5 feet of Bill they gain a 10% immediate boost to their health.  And maybe we balance that out with Bill not being able to use a sniper rifle, or he only has 90 hit points, or better still, he takes twice as long to pick up when he’s down because he’s an old man!

It’s certainly not a perfect mod, hell, it won’t ever even be built*.  But it accomplishes (or at the very least attempts) to do two things:

1).  It rewards and enforces the Taxonomy of Multiplayer Games theory through new “Personality” classes.

2).  It removes the irrelevancy of character choice from Left4Dead.

One of the reasons why I stopped playing L4D was because every game was the same, despite the AI Director and brilliance of the gameplay.  Character choices became arbitrary, and they all played exactly the same.  I’d love to try and win with four Francises.  Or four Zoeys, or really any combination thereof, and have those choices actually mean something other than “I’m the chick in the red jogging jacket,” and maybe even be a reflection of the player themselves.  I can just imagine four Francises, all trying to get to the Shotgun first (since only one of them can pick it up and get the bonus for using it), or four Zoeys, all hanging close and healing each other like crazy.  Hell, even three Zoeys and a Louis, who constantly darts out into the darkness bringing back small treasures, with the girls healing him like crazy to reward his adventurous forays into the night.  It just works.

In the end, I suppose it could be argued that I’m really not doing anything more than creating a Fighter , or Medic, or Ranger, or Paladin here, but the fiction and the expectation of how the game is played funnels it down into more of a personality than just a fantasy class.

If anyone knows how to mod L4D to make this work, I’m all ears.

* As it turns out, you can’t really mod Left 4 Dead, probably due to the EA publishing agreement.  It’s the only game that Valve makes which doesn’t use the default Source engine, so as a modder all you’re left with is the ability to make new levels, for the most part.

Now more than ever, I find myself with even less time to actually play games, and so I’m looking for experiences that involve smaller bites of gameplay that don’t ask me to spend hours and hours at a time on the stick.

I normally shy away from XBLA type titles because previously, for me, the value just hasn’t been there to justify the purchase.  Aways back that changed when Capcom released the Bionic Commando: Rearmed title.  At the time I bought it because I was a Bionic Commando fanboy, but it really clicked with me because of the “smaller bites” type of gameplay my schedule dictates; I no longer have four hours a night to dedicate to gaming.  I’m lucky if I have an hour to call my own, and even then I feel like I’m neglecting my parental/professional duties.

So fast forward to this past week, when I read on my Twitter feed everyone talking about the games Trials HD and Shadow Complex.  I’m in serious need of some “new game” experiences, but I don’t have the time to dedicate to say Batman: Arkham like I would like to, so I grab the demos, and am so impressed that I wind up making the purchases.

I’m not going to review these titles or anything, but it’s important to look at their roots to see what holds the keys to their successes.  Despite being very disparate titles in gameplay, they have a few things that are in common:

• Their gameplay is based off of “tried and true” old school game mechanics and game-isms.
• They both exist in a 2D level design but are rendered in 3D/contemporary graphics.
• They incorporate analog mechanics which replace the original digital/binary mechanics.

TrialsHD, the third in the Trials series (if you missed the $2 sale for Trials2 on Steam you really missed out), is a professional rendering of the now tired Flash Motorcycle/Bike Game that just about every free shockwave or flash game website has on it.  It takes those roots and runs with them, taking the on/off commands of a keyboard and replacing them all with analog triggers and joysticks.  Even playing TrialsHD on my 360 after playing Trials2 on my PC (without a controller) is a striking experience, and I’m finding I’m much much better at the game because of the analog input.  I no longer have to rapidly tap the gas to get the “inbetween” throttle position I desired.  They also added a ton of new mini-game types to it and a level editor that pack way more value than the free flash game which preceeded it could even hope to pretend to have.

Shadow Complex, as you may have heard by now, is basically a nice re-skin of Super Metroid, and thrown a new fiction/setting.  Sure, the Metroid comparison is a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s appropriate in that Shadow Complex borrows very heavily from its predecessor, and if you’re familiar with Metroid, you’ll be at home playing Shadow Complex.  Where the analog comes in is in its aiming mechanic, allowing you to select any individual angle you want (unlike in Super Metroid, where you’re stuck with one of 8 aiming positions, if memory serves).

It’s interesting to me, how new and exciting these old concepts become (Flash Bike Game/Super Metroid) when their old binary mechanics are replaced with some higher fidelity analog controls, and a heaping of more “relevant” 3D graphics.  I’m wondering if I would have enjoyed Bionic Commando: Rearmed even more if there was a bit less of a literal reskinning and a more liberal use of analog control?  I did enjoy Rearmed, but there might be something to the idea of taking that core gameplay and allowing it some breathing room with some analog control.

Knowing how this industry works, I would put money down on the fact that we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of idea: old 2D gameplay plus new analog mechanics and 3D aesthetics.  It would be hilarious but sad to see someone attempt to improve perfection by adding an analog component to Super Mario Bros (but still maintain the 2D gameplay), so maybe that one is off limits, but let’s have some fun with this concept.

• Elevator Action with a jump button added and a prone position (not just crouch), to give the player more positions to dodge bullets from, and aiming on an analog stick so that they can shoot out of the elevators on angles instead of forcing the elevators to move up and down to dodge.
• Sonic with run on an analog trigger, so that players must choose just how fast they need to run across different hazards/hills (instead of full speed all the time).
• Shinobi with an analog aim component for throwing stars from any angle to any angle (down while jumping, up while running, etc.)

These were actually tougher to come up with than I thought.  Anyone else have any to add?  Throw your ideas out in the comments.

Hey, guess what?  I didn’t know I was going to take a (looks over at date on previous post) THREE MONTH HIATUS?~??!!!? Jeeeeebus who do I think I am, anyway?

Wow, looking back previously, I’ve realized that I’ve really fallen off the writing/design/critiquing wagon, and usually put a small apology at the beginning of each post, but figured I’d throw one massive one up as its own post.

Things have been pretty crazy in Chez Game-Ism the past nine months or so.  The economy and the company I worked for went into a tailspin, I’m in a new job currently, the CCG I was working on as a side project became a reality, I attempted to heal an old injury and wound up making something else worse (not a fan of doctors at the moment), and my wife delivered our second baby just last week!  People usually say “pick three” when I wonder why I have an ulcer.

At any rate, I just wanted to let you know not to remove me from your RSS feed just yet (unless you have already, in which case, why are you using an RSS reader, and more importantly, how are you reading this then?).  I’ve got a handful of pieces in mind, and I’d write one tonight but I want to get a touch more gaming in before I have to succumb to another night of attempting to get a five day old baby to sleep for more than five hours while the sun is down.

Talk to you all very soon.

–Spitfire

I couldn’t resist.  The Spy’s new hat just had me laughing at its awesomeness, and thinking about the “FYI, I am a Spy” sprays that originally started popping up when TF2 first came out.

Every so often I just geek out on nerd culture + art culture, and this is the result.  If you don’t get where this is from, it’s uh, an homage to Magritte.  I had fun making it.  Please have fun converting it into sprays folks.

Link to a big full quality version (the biggest I have, sorry, not really desktop sized).

And I pre-made the 256×256 version if you already have the Valve Texture Converter ap thingamajig (I don’t).

Come on people, next time I’m backstabbed by a Spy I’d better see my spray up on the damn wall.  Let’s.  Have.  A go at it!

Okay, I have a serious bone to pick with the most recent TF2 Spy/Sniper Update.  At risk of throwing any dev cred I may have once had, I’m going to just come out and say it:  it feels unbalanced.

Now, I know, I know, someone, at some point, has cried foul at every other update.  But let’s take a look at what the weapon updates do based on Valve’s typical design philosphy, which is “this class is weak at X, so we will give him Y to compensate a bit for it.”  Previous updates were supposed to fix broken or weak classes, and maybe we’ve entered into classes that didn’t need fixing, because this update seems to only exascerbate existing strengths/weaknesses instead of solving them.

First, we’ll look at The Spy.

Dead Ringer:  A watch update that allows you while disguised (or otherwise) to appear dead on taking your first point of damage, at which point you’ll be cloaked for 8 seconds, presumably allowing you to kill your attacker.

Not bad.  Takes away your ability to cloak normally, and gives you a surprise use of it.  I’ve seen it in action, and even when someone warns you the spy has it, it’s effective.  There’s a good trade-off as well.  You can’t cloak normally, and the surprise cloak factor shows no trace of tell-tale cloaking clouds or haziness.

Cloak and Dagger:  A watch update that honestly has me a bit perplexed.  On the surface, it’s cool.  It allows you to stay permanently cloaked, and standing still recharges it.  The only drawback is that picking up metal or ammo doesn’t replenish it.  On the surface, this seems like an equitable trade-off.  Standing still for picking up ammo.

However.

You can always stand still.  You can even plan to stand still at specific corners of the map.  There isn’t always an ammo/metal pickup.  This means that it is significantly better than the default watch.  If it did something like use its juice a bit quicker than the default watch, I’d say it’s a fair tradeoff, but now the Spy can cross an entire map without being seen, ever, even though he has to do it patiently.  This one isn’t horribly imbalanced, but I feel that it’s just a touch imbalanced.

The Ambassador.  Easily the most beautiful gun in the game, this one tips the scales heavily into the “unbalanced” area.  To quote from the Spy update: “It has the ammo count of a revolver and the pinpoint accuracy of a sniper rifle, even at long range.”  Worse, it crits on headshots. Granted, it deals “15% less damage,” and has a “20% slower firing rate” than the primary revolver, but I’m not entirely convinced about that “15% less damage” number there.  The problem with the Ambassador is that Spies are now running around like cloaked snipers, taking headshots at everything that stands still (or doesn’t stand still).  They were deadly enough already.  What the Ambassador needed was more damage than the primary pistol (which it feels like it does), but not a chance to do crit headshotting.  That’s the sniper’s job, and more importantly, what the Ambassador does is give the Spy a second backstab, which I’m going to get to in a minute.

So, the Spy update is pretty nice for spies.  You get a couple of great watches to play with (even though one is slightly overpowered by a touch), and an awesome pistol that now makes your class effective at more than just backstabbing when it comes to getting your kill on.  Not sure that’s what the Spy needed.  Most players want spies to be more effective at what he does, such as staying cloaked, in costume, sapping sentries, and backstabbing.  I don’t think he really needed a better pistol, but hey, he has it now.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel The Sniper got a similar update.

First off, Valve’s raison de etre for the Sniper update had me pretty cheesed.  They wanted to make other players feel better when playing against Snipers?  So…instead of making the Sniper better, they wanted to encourage players to self-nerf themselves and take themselves out of the long-range game?  Don’t get me wrong, the Huntsman (detailed below) is pretty great (it’s not for me), but based on the press release, the Sniper update doesn’t sound like it’s off to a good start for people who love playing Snipers.

The Huntsman: A bow and arrow which only takes one second to reach “full charge,” crits on headshot.  Damage is out on this one at time of this writing, but a lot of players like using it to be a more mobile sniper.  I personally don’t care for it as the arrows take time to travel through the air, so you often miss your mark.

Jarate:  Easily one of the greatest additions to gaming ever, just because you can throw pee, this thing puts out friendly fires, busts spy cloaks, marks enemy players (even disguised spies), and makes every hit they take +35% more damage.  Plus, it’s fun to throw.  Your pee.  On anyone.  Only downside to Jarate is that it takes up your SMG slot.  This is a bit of a problem, as the SMG was the only decent short/medium defense a sniper had, and it was just okay at best.  Granted, the rifle has gained the “no-scope” crosshair, but a Sniper with Jarate is still at a bit of a disadvantage if someone moves to medium range against his rifle.  On day one throwing Jarate got enemies to back off, but now they know just to press harder offensively when covered in urine before you can no-scope them.  It’s like advertising you’re defenseless.

Razorback: Easily one of the worst additions to gaming ever, because with the Spy update it is completely useless.  Hell, even if the Spy didn’t get an update, it’s still mostly useless.  When it was first announced I suspected that it was a joke, perhaps.  Here’s a recap of how it works:  The Sniper wears this impossible to miss giant tribal shield on his back which electrocutes and “locks up” a Spy’s knife when he stabs you with it.  Only problem:  spies won’t stab you if they see you wearing it, and they’d have to be absolutely blind to not notice it.  Wait, that’s not the only problem.  The other problem with it is that it weighs so much it slows you down by 15% when wearing it.  Considering that the only thing this shield does is stop one single backstab (for two seconds), prevents no other damage, takes up your SMG slot, and slows you down considerably, it is completely worthless.  Most spies worth any salt at all already have the Ambassador, so a shield that is meant to prevent backstabs which is obvious in nature (instead of being hidden under your shirt) is meaningless in a world that has spies which can simply switch to the Ambassador from 20 feet away and one shot you in the face for the kill.  I originally joked that enemy teams would simply send two spies to kill a sniper (one to take out the shield and one to take out the sniper), but they don’t even have to do that. Just send the spy with the Ambassador, and the situation is solved.  An entire slot in the Sniper’s update, the slot that most needed to stop a Spy from backstabbing you, is wasted.

I get that you can’t give the Sniper a tool to stop spies from backstabbing them indefinately, but how about claymore mines or something?  Battlefield 2 solved the “vulnerable” sniper issue by allowing snipers to drop claymore (anti-personelle) mines behind (or in front of) him which would detonate on enemy movement.  Problem solved.  The TF2 sniper could drop a mine behind him which could be cloaked to enemy players, and if a spy tried to stab (in costume or no), kablooey, mine goes off.  Granted, that could be griefed by having Snipers use them offensibly, so just give them one.  One shot, one use, and they have to replenish them at a locker.

Hell, I’d even take a bomb vest at this point which guaranteed that the spy died if he stabbed me (so I can take him with me).  That’s good risk-reward, and makes spies think twice about backstabbing.

But the bottom line here is that the Sniper update did not give the Sniper any decent tools to prevent or mitigate backstabbing, or more importantly, keeping a Spy from always getting the upper hand at close range when you’re scoped or even just at the rear of the field.  Preventing backstabbing at the expense of guaranteeing a face-peeling shot from the Ambassador is merely trading a knife for a bullet, with largely the same effect.  The Ambassador has even made a mini-sniper out of the Spy by allowing him to oneshot snipers, medics, engies, even slow scouts from range.

And so I don’t sound like a sniper, I’ve got a treat in the next post for you spray loving spies out there.

So, the Spy Update is complete (although they never revealed his 3rd kit upgrade, unless it IS the portable Baccarat detector), and already there is some fun debate over a tiny tidbit in the short.

First off, this is super spoiler laden, so if you haven’t watch it yet, go see it in HD here.  Take plenty of time to enjoy the text gags (there’s a few in the big blue board, the bell ringing, the dossier folder, just keep looking).

Awesome, right?  Okay then, let’s move on.

At the end of the piece, Red Spy picks up the photo of Scout’s Mom, and says what sounds like:

“Ah, ma petite chou-fleur.”

This, literally translated, means:

“Ah, my little cauliflower.”

While folks might find this hilarious, consider that the majority of French expressions are founded in agriculture.  Thier version of “Oh my god!” is actually “Oh la vache!” which literally translates to mean “Oh the cow!”  (If it was not literally translated we’d probably say it meant “Holy Cow!”).  So, this is absolutely an honest term of endearement on the behalf of the Red Spy.

Now, some folks on the internet who are horrible at translating and probably used Google Translator or Altavista (Babblefish) think he’s saying

“Ah, ma petite chaude fleur.”

This would translate to something more shocking, and perhaps validate some folks’ thoughts on the Pyro being a female, because, again, literally translated, this means

“Ah, my little hot flower.”

Oh HO you say!  Except for a small problem:  There’s this rule in French grammar called the BANGS rule.  It stands for “Beauty Age Number Goodness Size.”  Any adjective or descriptor that meets the BANGS rule must come before the noun in the sentence.  So, if the Red Spy is truly French and wanted to say “Ah, my little hot flower,” he would have said:

“Ah, ma petite fleur chaude.”

This is a proper diagram of the intended sentence “Ah, my little hot flower.”  The reason chau comes before flower in the cauliflower sentence is because it’s a hyphenated noun, so it’s all the same word.  Petite still comes in front because it fits the “Small” qualifier in the BANGS rule.

So sorry folks, the Spy was not referring to Scout’s Mom as “hot.”  Logic, however, says that this does not disqualify Scout’s Mom from being the Blue Pyro.  Especially since she wasn’t visible in this video, and we haven’t “met” her him them yet.

If you want real proof that the Scout’s Mom is the Pyro, assuming Valve would leave any real evidence of that in the piece, you’d probably have to comb the images pretty hard.  In fact, if you look at the pictures in the dossier closely, you can kinda make out that ZOMG IS SCOUT’S MOM CARRYING THE PYRO’S PURSE!!!!!!

It’s the correct shape to be the Pyro’s clutch purse, maybe?

Also seen here in the first images that slide out of the dossier:

Okay wait maybe that’s not the Pyro’s purse.  Pyro’s purse is rounded on the corners, is color tinted to her team (blue-ish in this case), and has a big pink flower on it.

Nevermind, nothing to see here, carry on, evidence is definitive: Scout’s Mom is NOT the Pyro.

I bet you never expected you’d get a French grammar lesson here, did you?

It’s been awhile, no?  I have a perfectly good excuse.  In fact, it’s so good, it’s not an excuse.

Work has been pretty frustrating lately; my project was shelved and now I’ve been pretty much battlefield demoted or side-moted or whatever the “moted” you want to call it to a position that I used to do but doesn’t really include game design in the core job description deets.  With the state of the current industry, I’m pretty happy to just have a job, especially since it’s still in the industry.

So I haven’t exactly been inspired to write a lot lately.  I’ve been reading a lot of what the other game critics have been writing, and it seems like there’s just a general dearth of stuff to critique.  GDC just didn’t leave me as invigorated as the previous year’s (at least the talks didn’t, anyway), and to be honest, I’m more of an “in the trenches” kind of do-er rather than a guy who is comfortable just sitting back and critiquing.

With that in mind, and due to some crazy circumstances, I’ve been working on a side project that if you’ve been reading my Twitter feed you already have an idea of what it is.  I just needed something to invigorate the designer in me and keep the tools sharp since work has become more of a job for the time being than something that motivates me to create.  The project is still super ultra top secret, but I will say that it started as a pet “can I do this” one man project and has ballooned out completely into a full pitch concept.

Hopefully I or someone else will have an announcement of sorts in the next couple of weeks, and even if that isn’t the case, I’ll either be done with it (and therefore have more time to write), or I’ll be working on it like crazy, but at least might be able to talk about it a little bit.

So, keep tuning in.  I’m not dead, yet.

I’m back from GDC and slowly climbing back onto the writing horse.  I’d apologize for taking forever between posts again but hey let’s be honest, I’ve been doing a ton of that lately so let’s just move on.

I saw some great talks, but one that kinda bothered me in a way and yet at the same time invigorated some of my old opinions was the Rant Panel.  This year’s was five (actually more) of some of the most esteemed game critics in the industry.  While I get that this was a podium for opinions to be thrown out there, I couldn’t help but wonder about a few of the positions, and rant back a little bit of my own on the matter.

One of the biggest talking points was how Game Journos (for lack of a better word) could do their jobs better.  N’Gai (who incidentally I’ve found myself disagreeing with more and more lately) had some of the most salient points of the whole talk, asking writers to eschew the terms “hardcore” and “casual.”  I’m paraphrasing, but his example of “Who’s more hardcore:  the person who plays Peggle five hours a night 7 days a week or the guy who plays Gears two hours a night Monday through Thursday?”  Who’s the casual player there?  Who’s hardcore?  N’Gai asked for better descriptors to be used, like “competitor” or “completionist” or “tourist.”  These terms don’t just benefit writers, they benefit developers and publishers alike, because we’ve been working on a binary system that doesn’t really identify anyone properly.  N’Gai’s proposed terms helps us figure out who we’re making the product for, and who to write about.

But some of the rants I just found…lacking.  Stephen Totilo (of MTV’s Multiplayer), while being critical in general said “Our reporting is fine. There’s no lack of good journalism, though there may be a lack of effort in finding it…There is a lack of good writing.”

Stephen, I expected more from a guy who started his speech with “I’m going to lose some friends over this.”  Look, fuck the writing.  I don’t care if you use the word “compelling” or adverbs or adjectives or two hundred words that end in LY.  I seriously don’t.  Besides the fact that most of America’s readers only read at a 4th grade level, Game Journalism isn’t at the point where the only thing left to hone is your craft.  My god man, I’ve seen stories, especially lately in this economy with bankruptcies and studio closings which concern corporate law, and there’s no mention of a corporate lawyer weighting in on the piece.  Are you a lawyer?  Did you pass a bar in corporate law?  Why then are you or your contemporaries writing about it?  Why are there one-sided opinion pieces where the writers don’t even attempt to contact the company they’re writing about for comment?  Do you guys realize that when you get the facts wrong in one piece, it brings into question everything you’ve ever written?  I get that you can’t get everything right 100% of the time, and that sometimes you just have to go to print with what you’ve got, but could we please actually try to make sure that you’re getting the facts straight before you go to print?  If you think this isn’t a big deal, then you’re not taking your job seriously enough.

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