“The 25th Consumer Electronics Show… showed very clearly that one thing continues to dominate the media and electronics business in the USA. This is not the personal computer – which seems to be causing far more interest in Europe than in America – but the video game.”

So while in the UK we were busy typing in listings from games magazines, in the US Atari, Mattel were creating ready-to-play cartridge based games.

Getting compelling press coverage was made difficult by the fact that it was impossible to get decent screen shots. Think how much of the pages in modern games mags are covered with glossy, full-colour, high-resolution screen shots. Without these, you’re left with nothing but words to describe these visual wonders. Luckily, you didn’t need much of a vocabulary to describe the games of the time; they were either based on existing analogue games, or they were derived from the small pool of original video game ideas:

“Munchie, which is similar to PacMan” … “Cosmic Raiders is a fast-action Defender style games” … “Solar Conqueror is an Asteroids game.”

Of course, some of this “re-purposing” was pukka; Coleco made table-top versions of things like PacMan, Donkey Kong, and Frogger (image above). You can imagine how faithful these arcade conversions actually were…

We’ve made quite some progress in the last 30 years, both in terms of game mechanics and graphics. It’s best summed up by 2 images, I’m sure you can guess which is from 1982, and which from 2012?

Click through these images for the full scans on flickr.

Pegs vs Triads

1. Minimise cost of entry/exit – Instant on, instant off

If there’s one thing that most characterises the mobile gaming experience, it’s the difference in playing cycle frequency and duration. As this highly unscientific graph shows:

Gaming intensity over an 18 hour period

Handheld games need to be able to be picked-up and played, and similarly, put-down, in a flash. It’s just not feasible to insist on finishing a mission, returning to a safe-house etc, before the game can be safely stopped. You don’t want to lose the last few minutes progress just because you’ve arrived at your destination. Peggle has a few wrinkles here, the only times it crashed on me was after unlocking the phone to continue a game, but generally it’s perfectly paced for snatched play; each ball lasts a few seconds, and each game only a few minutes. Furthermore when resuming a game you can instantly see the number of blue and orange pegs remaining and therefore gauge game progress at a glance. Having a free-roaming city to explore is a fantastic experience, but keeping track of where you are requires more mental effort/investment.

2. Support restricted input – One-handed operation

Personally, I get a few good hours a week of gaming time on the tube. Unfortunately most of that is while hanging from the hand-rails amongst a crowd of other commuters. This one-handed playing style is completely incompatible with GTA’s control model; the driving requires one hand for the accelerator, brake etc, and another for the directional controls. The overall pacing of the game is also important; twitch gaming doesn’t fit well with being buffeted around on the underground, but board-game style pacing is largely unaffected.

3. Degrade output gracefully – Shhhhhh!

GTA is most definitely a multi-sensory experience. The radio soundtrack that kicks in as you jump into a ‘jacked motor. The ambient sounds of the city as you stalk the sidewalks looking for unsuspecting victims to eviscerate. Peggle has its own rousing soundtrack of course, Ode to orange peg Joy, but it’s much more of an ancillary aspect of the game. You can safely turn it off and it’s not going to reduce your ability to play, or alter the play experience. The importance of this becomes apparent whilst enjoying a surreptitious few minutes of fun in, say, just for example, err, the toilets at work. Not that I would ever do that, obviously…

4. Work with device restrictions – Physicality

One of the things I found most jarring about the translation of the GTA experience to the iPhone is the very thing that makes the iPhone what it is: the touch screen. It’s just odd not having the haptic feedback on a stick, especially when you’re virtually pushing a car round a tight corner, or trying to chase someone down the street. I just felt like I needed to feel the limits of the controls. Part of the reason for this is the fact that you’re essentially controlling physical objects directly, whereas Peggle is much more abstract – albeit fundamentally based on the concrete physical behaviour of a falling ball.

…but which is best?

The answer? Who knows! The fact is they’re completely different experiences, so it depends what you’re looking for. The thing about smartphones, portable gaming devices etc, is that people use them in a vast array of different environments and in very different ways. Personally I don’t want a console replacement, but I do enjoy console-like experiences on the go every once in a while. I’m willing to change the way I use the phone – at least temporarily – to accommodate that. But I also love a game that fits perfectly with the way I already use my device; especially if it happens to be incredibly addictive, with simple but emergent game-play. These days I’m a real casual gamer, having to grab what time I can between work and the family, so having something that I can enjoy in 30 second segments on my own terms is a real pleasure.

It will be interesting to see how developers, gaming and otherwise, deal with the different usability requirements of these emerging platforms. These factors could quickly become important differentiators in a crowded market.

Well, I’ve done it: I’ve got my first game live on the AppStore. It’s been an interesting journey. I’m terribly bad at getting my hands on devkits and SDKs, having a play with them and then not doing anything constructive. This dates way back to things like the Playstation NetYaroze, which was pretty expensive, and with which I failed to produce anything concrete. So this time around all the pieces were in place: shiny new “gaming” kit, interesting SDK, low cost of entry. I was determined to create!

I’ll be making a series of posts on the process and details of creating it, in the interest of sharing the fun. In the meantime, you can find out more about the game here.

It caught my attention because it sets out to be different from many games of today. For a start, it’s not a sequel or subtitle (”Game: the second”), it’s new IP, and more importantly it recognises that games can be all about storytelling and direction. In fact, the game sets out to blur the line between participant/player and storyteller.

I was a bit disappointed by the visuals, partly I think from being spoilt by Half Life 2. The lip syncing and face rendering in general is nowhere near that level of fidelity. The character animation is also a little weak, there are obvious switches between motion capture sequences (walk to run etc). But when playing the game you really don’t notice these things. It is so immersive and engaging that your suspension of disbelief easily carries you past these aspects.

There are a combination of elements to the game. “Traditional” walking around, exploring a scene, looking for interesting aspects to investigate (which reminded me of Resident Evil in many ways; looking for that glistening item in the dark room) and the interactive actions, driving conversations and performing physical actions. This is a similar to the QTE mechanism in Shenmue (or at least the Dreamcast version that I played), although it’s more widely and better used. It consists of using the controls (the keyboard and mouse in my case) to ape the actions of the character on screen, to perform Track and field style button bashing for effort, or to follow Simon-says style colour sequences. They work well as a means to link you physically to the character in the game world, for example, using the controls to breath in a slow and measured way to keep the character calm. My main complaint about this is that I found myself focusing on the control overlays on screen, rather than the action that my character was performing behind them! Given some of the fantastic sequences the game contains, this is a shame.
The game is a little on the short side; it left me wanting more, but in many ways I prefer this to being forced to perform mundane/frustrating tasks that serve to artificially lengthen playing time. So often nowadays I never get to see the end of a game, despite investing hours of time. I did however, feel that the story had a slightly rushed feel towards the end, given the lesiurely pace at the start of the game. If this was a deliberate attempt to reach some sort of crescendo, it didn’t quite work.
Reading this back, it all sounds a bit negative: it isn’t meant to be! Despite it’s quirks this was a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting game to play. If you’re into different gaming experiences I’d definitely give it a try.