Okami is always looked at as a beautifully artistic game

When we look at titles like FIFA or Madden, though, it’s purely a piece of objective software, rather then a piece of art. Even if hundreds of man-hours are lovingly poured into the rendering of every thinly-layered hairline in Wayne Rooney’s head, you would still be pushed quite hard to argue that FIFA is an artistic piece of work. Take a snapshot of it, though, and maybe you’re onto something.

The argument changes, that perhaps only artistic software creation, like upcoming Disney title “Epic Mickey” can make a game artistic – and that everything else is just software. Even Crysis, which is by far one of the most beautiful looking games we’ll lay our eyes on is just a huge piece of software rather then an artistic piece. Killzone 3 will always be looked at as a big dirty shooter game, rather then a piece of art.

As a computer scientist by trade, I find a lot of poetic justice to be found in wonderfully written code. Sure, that’s all a bit metrosexual but I do think future generations will get a lot of pleasure from reading lines of well written code. The seeds of that are being laid down with sites like Stack Overflow and Github. So, something like Killzone which has a wonderfully rendered art style – with millions of polygons going into creating a very easy-on-the-eye world can become artistic, not only because of that, but also because it does this so smoothly and elegantly with well written code. Sure we can’t see it – but we’re gamers. We can feel it working in the background. You know something’s written well because it just works.

As we move into an era where programmers can more elegantly express themselves because hardware can catch up to our over-active imaginations and artists can actually stop holding back their talent to allow rendering engines to work we might see art spill out from games, rather then the other way around. Rather then books, paintings or films inspiring game developers, game developers can inspire authors, painters and film makers.

Let’s be honest, games can be wonderful things. It takes years to make one game. A lot of hard work goes into the development of a good game, but it can be forgotten so quickly. Only the best survive to make more iterations of their title. And most often, those are the prettiest in terms of software and artwork. Can we stop trying to compare games to paintings, and define our own version of “art” now?

Surely playing any random level of New Super Mario Bros on the Wii is as artistic and immersive an experience as seeing a Van Gogh in Amsterdam? Not only that, considering games as art opens the world of art up to millions more people then ‘art’ today is opening itself up to. By no means am I saying all games are art, but if we analyse games like Halo like we analyse a new piece of classical music then maybe the world of gaming will attract more and more talent, keeping both the software and artwork side of things in perfect harmonic orchestral sync.

Ohhh, header. Kinda like the old one...

Ireland has a very strange, crowded market with games sites but I think the calibre of writing skill and technical gaming know-how of the various writers here sets us above the rest, and I know plenty of you come here for a daily dose of news and critical commentary on the industry and the software it gives us.

So, moving forward as we get ready to celebrate a year in existence, what’s in the pipeline? Well, first and foremost, more of the same. We’ve built a good solid readership over the year, and a few of you regularly comment on our articles (the more who comment the better, though… if you keep emailing me for a forum it’s useless until we have plentiful threads!). We were promising a podcast, and we hope to do extra media stuff this year for you all. How that turns out we’ll have to see, though.

Working as well as the current one. Yes, that is todays posts. Yes, it is LIVE, but in a secret location

Biggest of all is a planned revamp of the site design. What we have is lovely, but it could be better. Maybe not more functional, but it’s time to move away from somewhat plain and into sexy. But classy. Too many sites look gaudy and awful, no more so then on Irish blogs (not just gaming ones, mind you). The images attached to this post are a sneak preview. So, what do we think?

Cheers for the first year of reading our drivel, here’s to another!

It’s a 20 minute long piece which doesn’t do an incredible amount except ape previous, similarly themed works. It does look fantastic and has some great music at the end, though.

The news story was the opinion of the people behind God of War III, a game which I am currently enjoying so you can enjoy my words later in the week and decide whether or not to put down €50 on the game. That opinion was rather negative of games journalists and sites that publish their reviews. Why? Well, the GoW developers reckon they have an epic title on their hands, one that couldn’t possibly be finished in 8 hours, as the reviews claim. I’ve not yet gotten into 8 hours of gameplay, but I’d be willing to hedge my bets that this is the average time for gaming these days. At least in story-modes.

The debate in our comments section focused on a review by our own radio celebrity, Terra Corrupt, who posted his own review of Final Fantasy XIII, which is a rather long game. At the start of his review he mentions the review is not based on the entire plot, as he has “only” reached hour 15 of the campaign but wanted to jot down what he thought thus far. Later in the review he said he would revisit this as he progresses. Awesome, I thought.

Instead, a huge debate spawned based on the fact that he had given a mark, and opinion on a title he had not completed. Something that really got up peoples’ goat. Why? Well, the potential is that people feel cheated out of a review (despite not paying for access to the site… though thanks if you do click ads!) and feel our opinion is worthy enough to decide whether or not they want to spend money. Of course, this is a rather hefty thing to carry on the backs of games journalists. It essentially means the entire industry rises or falls based on our opinions of titles. Sure, review scores have long dictated consumer spending, not just in games. It’s still a lofty responsibility. Controlling other peoples’ money.

Here we adopt a 5-star rating. It’s easier that way. Simpler to read into, understand and explain. 2 stars is a potentially decent title if it’s cheap, 3 is a rental, 4 is a good game worth buying and 5 is a prized possession. The lowly 1 star is held in reserve for the lowest of the low.

Some people will only purchase games based on whether or not they get that 4 star rating. Interesting, as often this site runs late with reviews, as we are volunteer-based and most of us have real jobs to do during the day. Which means people are willing to wait, to see what a reviewer thinks before spending their cash. Sure, huge titles like Final Fantasy, Battlefield and their ilk are likely to not sway anyone’s opinion – I would imagine most people already know if they’re buying those games long before they’re released. Most people just want to get a feel for what the game is like from a review, written by someone who has played through the game ad-nauseum to deliver content to web readers.

However, what if my review of Battlefield was only based on 1 hour of single player game? It wasn’t, of course, and I had reached level 4 or so online before writing my review. But what if it was? If I just wrote that review would people make any comments or gripes? I doubt it. The experience is explained in as vague detail as possible so as to not spoil the title, but to give a nice overview of my experiences. What if I explicitly said I had only played a short bit of the game and came to conclusions based on what could only be described as a demo experience? Would the opinion of the reader change then? Of course.

Reading the review of FF13 in question, no way would you think that review was half-baked, lazy or written from the perspective of someone who hammily scrambled some words together to form a vague opinion of something they hated. Some commented the review was “all over the place”. I disagree. It was written with a real sense of affection for the game. A real feeling that the guy who played this wanted to play it, and couldn’t wait to share his 15 hour experience with the public. Even if 15 hours was only one third of the experience, if a man decides that’s worthy of telling the internet that this game is absolutely worth the price of admission at that point, to put his reputation on the line at that stage to call it right there, then jesus christ, that’s a game worth buying. And no, I’m not directly referencing the FF13 review. I mean any review. If I ever play a game and don’t complete it, but review it anyway and state “at half way through the campaign, I’m in love…”, believe me that I want people to know how good my experience is.

Reviewers on “big” sites do this all the time. Do you really think every game on IGN, Gamespot or 1up is played start to finish, all the time? Not a chance. I’ve seen reviews on huge sites use god mode to go through a game. That’s not the same experience as the user. On top of that, a few years ago a Gamespot reviewer was sacked for giving a bad review to a sponsors’ title. How could anyone lay their trust in huge organisations like that? Why let them direct your cash to the tills of an organisation that would call for the head of a reviewer who didn’t enjoy his/her experience?

Ultimately, shoryuken.ie plays host to a number of people who review titles. Nearly every one are completed before being put to the public. In fact, it’s a rare occasion when a title is reviewed after a partial play… I would probably bet FF13 is the first such occasion, too. But FF13 is a mammoth game. No one expects a review of an WoW exclusively when the player has reached the top-tier levels. It’s unrealistic. Why expect it when the game is literally days long in total game time?

The irony is that the debate that sparked over such a review that was, as stated, completed after “only” 15 hours of game time gave the reviewer the opportunity to appears on The Last Word with Matt Cooper on TodayFM. Listen out tonight (16/03/10) after 6PM.

The game, according to “anonymous sauces sources” will be completed in 2010, but not released until 2011 to give Halo Reach some time in the spotlight. A move Microsoft will hope to use in order to spread the wealth a little over that time period.

As a long-time Mac user this news blows my mind in ways I couldn’t even fathom, but Valve have finally seen the white, brushed-steel light and decided that in April, us glorious users of OS X will legitimately get to play Source-enabled games, including the full roster of first-party Valve titles (half life, counter-strike, team fortress et al) and a number of the 1,000 plus third-party titles on the Steam platform.

This opens steam up to a new roster of fans, as well as allowing current fans to carry over their Windows-purchased titles to Mac at no extra cost and continue to interact with their friends via Steam’s excellent social networking features.

In a press release Valve said, “Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

Portal 2 will be the first title to get a simultaneous release on both platforms. Fitting, given Portal is set in a serenely efficient white world environment.

W!Games represents a new lease of life in Dutch software development. The largest piece of entertainment produced in the country was Guerilla’s €43million monolith, Killzone 2. Perhaps with smaller ambitions, W!Games releases it’s second title, a rather more interesting affair then it’s first release; My Horse & Me.

Set in a rich environment and world which will be revisited in future W!Games titles, Greed Corp is a new endeavor for the company. A risky one at that. Using interesting set-pieces, characters and weaponry, they have set about creating a downloadable turn-based strategy title in an era where big shooters and explosions are king.

The environment is important, as it’s set in a world called “Mistbound”, which will play host to more then one title in the future. A rich, detailed environment and world story has been created to be a set piece for several games in the future from the company. Details as far down as a brand of tea available in the game have been carefully constructed by the Amsterdam-based developer.

The story revolves around four factions fighting for the remnants of the worlds’ land which is, rather inconveniently, falling into oblivion. Thus, resources are very important. The pieces of hexagonal land you own will reap financial rewards, letting the player buy more harvesters, walkers, turrets and so on.

The rich environment is laden with graphical and audio brilliance

Playing the game can get frustrating. The game is often based on luck rather then strategy, which for some will add a much fancied element of surprise to the gameplay, but for others will add a huge amount of frustration. Quite often winning or losing comes down to a single piece of land after destroying all the other pieces – which doesn’t necessarily slot in nicely to the story arc which W!Games plans on continuing with further titles.

Harvesters are a double-whammy. They do not attack anyone but do earn you money, but will destroy the land around it. So, the exchange is cash for land – and the ultimate goal is to hold onto land, and steal land by building armories that produce walkers… and using turrets and so on you can attack enemies and steal their hexagonal land pieces. It can be a fine balance of land versus firepower and money.

You start with a tutorial level, which is, for the most part, a bit useless. You’ll learn very little until you actually dive in and play against factions. Once this happens it becomes quite good, if not sometimes frustrating, fun. You begin fighting on a small piece of land against one other faction, and slowly build up to larger portions of land fighting against the three other factions.

Graphics are quite lush for a downloadable title. €10/800MSP gets you a fair whack of game, but I would almost buy it on the premise of revisiting the world over and over again, as the character design and landscape is rather interesting.

With online and offline modes available this game is worth a few bob. It’s a definite winner for any strategy game fans, or even board game fans. It has a relaxed vibe with great colours, characters and sounds. Even more, it’s worth becoming acquainted with a deep, rich world that W!Games have built up to begin exploiting with future titles – like a harvester exploits a bit of land in Greed Corp.

In response to the growing global opportunities presented by the gaming industry, Dublin Institute of Technology has launched a one-year full-time Masters Degree in Digital Games. This programme has been designed in collaboration with many of the world’s top game industry companies including Microsoft Games Studios.

Microsoft Game Studios currently employs over 1,000 people worldwide and works with a significant range of independent developers throughout Europe. Microsoft Game Studios Ireland has been responsible for the localisation of some of the world’s biggest games including Halo-3.

Molyneux, creator of popular video game titles such as Fable, Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and Black & White, spoke about Role Playing Games and their inherently cinematic nature. Connelly, an Irishman who is in charge of the development of one of Microsoft’s biggest releases for the Xbox 360 this year, talked on the confluence of gaming and film. This was followed by a panel discussion addressing RPG game development within the Irish gaming industry and was chaired by Aphra Kerr.

The games industry is one of today’s most dynamic and fast-moving creative sectors and there is high demand in the industry for experienced and skilled programmers, producers, and designers. This exciting new programme has been introduced by DIT to meet the increasing demand from the games industry for postgraduates with the highest level of skills required by the industry.

A recent report* shows that employment in this sector in Ireland has grown by 400% in the past seven years. With the success of Irish owned companies such as Havok, Demonware and Jolt Online and the increasing presence of multinational players such as Microsoft, PopCap, Gala Networks, Goa, Blizzard and Activision, the profile of the digital games industry in Ireland is growing internationally. According to Prof. Brian Norton, DIT President “DIT has been providing courses on game programming since 2006 and has a proven track record in producing graduates with the highest level of skills. DIT’s new MSc in Digital Games presents a fantastic opportunity to broaden the pool of expertise in Ireland.”

The MSc in Digital Games will address the key occupational areas identified by the Forfás report on the International Digital Media Industry. These are “design; artistic/creative; programming; management/project management and quality assurance”.

DIT’s MSc in Digital Games is aimed at individuals who wish to innovate or work in the digital game industry, anyone with a serious interest in understanding and making interesting games. It will appeal to graduates from diverse undergraduate and work experiences, including visual arts and media, and computer science. The programme has been designed to prepare graduates for a broad range of careers across the computer gaming industry including game designers, level designers, game software engineers, project managers, consultants, and games analysts.

The programme provides students with a state-of-the-art learning environment in specialised design and game programming labs. It combines the very latest technology with classes given by highly experienced lecturers, many of whom are involved with cutting-edge research in serious games, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, embodied agents and music technology ensuring that students have access to the very latest thinking, and techniques . Uniquely building on the combined expertise of DIT’s School of Media and the School of Computing, this industry-oriented programme will emphasise creativity and innovation through interdisciplinary study, cross-faculty cooperation, and constant industry input.

This full-time programme has both a technical and a creative stream and will provide modules in ludology, game design, game engine programming, animation, modding, digital audio and video, motion graphics, project management and the business of games.

For more information see www.dit.ie and www.seriousgames.ie . To see our liveblogging of the event head over to our twitter account, @shoryuken_ie.

While we’ve received no contact or response from anyone involved, some investigating turns up that this company is indeed based in Dublin’s Digital Hub. The company, called Big Collision Games, has a website at bigcollisiongames.com, which ironically loads up with a background sound of crowds cheering. The site outlines the companies mission to deliver the worlds best free-to-play MMOs, including the controversial title from the Australian operation (then called InterZone) “Futebol”. The soccer title is apparently in beta testing and will be launched before the start of the World Cup.

Futebol has it’s own home on the web here. After some digging I found that the game utilises the Australian-developed technology Big World Tech, which acts as an MMO backend for web games like this.

Interestingly, the company has four open positions for work, as listed on their site and as tweeted by @TheDigitalHub themselves. A shocking move given the treatment of staff in the Australian-based firm. Senior Systems Programmer, Web Developer, Associate Producer & IT Technologist are the positions available within the start-up. Interestingly, from the original comment thread here on shoryuken, one of the IZ victims posted a comment which wrapped up by saying the following:

Bottom line : never, EVER EVER work for these snakes. They are not at all interested in the business of making a good game, pure and simple. Investigations have shown that they have upwards of seven companies that move money and shares around in order to get away with this bullshit – basically what you see here is a “pump and dump” scandal that went horribly wrong for these particular snakes.

Let the Irish Dev community be warned : DON’T DO IT. Marty and Greg and Mike will talk to you VERY sweetly and you’ll almost be convinced by what “nice guys” they are – but make no mistake, the -second- you question their integrity, you are dust to them.

You have been warned, Irish Games Devs – don’t do it!

Again, we’ll keep you updated if we get anything more.

Remeber that piece we did about Peter Molyneux at X10? Of course you do.

Well, see the man in the fleshy flesh in the magestic location of my beloved DIT, Aungier St next Thursday 25th February at 6.30pm. The event takes place as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival under the banner of a “Games Forum”. Molyneux will be on hand to discuss RPGs and their inherently cinematic nature. This will be followed by a panel discussion addressing RPG game development within the Irish gaming industry and will be chaired by Aphra Kerr with Peter Conolly, Executive Producer from Microsoft Games Studios also in attendance.

The mighty DIT!

Also, of interest to me anyway as an undergrad student in the college, DIT will take a moment to launch their new masters course for media and science students in computing fields: MSc Digital Games. The blurb follows:

Digital games comprise a large and fast-growing part of the global entertainment industry. This new Masters programme will prepare graduates to become innovators in this exciting field. It provides a multi-disciplinary and well-rounded education in game conception, design and manufacture, uniquely building on the combined expertise of the Digital Media Centre, and the Schools of Media and Computer Science. This full-time programme will provide modules in Ludology, game design, programming, animation, project management and the business of games. The modular structure of the course will cater for varying levels of experience in each area. Particular emphasis will be placed on integrating skills through group projects. It will appeal to graduates from diverse undergraduate and work experiences, including the visual and media arts, and computer science.

And yes, “ludology” is a real word.

So if you’re not there to hear Molyneux talk about how great he is you’ll be missing out on a fun event as well as a prime opportunity to kick me in the shins for giving Need for Speed a bad review.

Tickets are available here and cost about €6!