games

Street Fighter – The Poem

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I wrote a full review of Super Street Fighter IV 3DS for Game People that you can read here. Whilst I was writing it a few rhyming lines appeared on the page, so I extracted them and built this poem, it seemed a pity for it to go to waste, the last two lines are my favourite.

Super Street Fighter IV 3DS
By Ian Hughes/epredator
inspired by Plan B at the London launch party

Ryu shouts Hadoken,
Firing energy again,
Lenticular 3d,
Powers the graphics engine.

The 3DS from Ninty,
Shows a cool new way,
To punch kick and block,
Making enemies sway.

Launch Manga ultra combos,
In the stunning 3d layers,
Touchpad assist buttons,
Help novice players.

Challenge the arcade,
Or random 3DS out there,
Built-in wi-fi signals,
Connect combatants everywhere.

Figure Points are earned,
And spent on a team,
Of fantasy Street Fighters,
Kept in your data stream.

Called StreetPass,
It’s a new gaming feature,
That delivers your team,
To anyone in 30 metres.

It happens when your 3DS,
Is in a state of sleep,
Win a numbers battle,
More Figure Points you reap.

The characters are funny
El Fuerte screams his challenge out,
“It’s Super Dynamic Cooking Time!”
That’s serious comedy clout.

A launch title for the handheld,
Delivers a bag of tricks,
No headaches here just nose bleeds.
From Chun Li’s lightning kicks.

3ds StreetPass and pedometers – new social gaming twist

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A feature of the new 3ds handheld that does get mentioned but is generally overshadowed by the lenticular lens 3d screen is its network capabilities. StreetPass may seem an odd concept but in terms of ensuring you have the console on your person at all times and powered up it is fascinating.
What StreetPass does is keep the 3ds wireless running whilst in standby but in a low power mode. It looks for other 3ds consoles within about 30 metres of it at any time. Why? Well it does this so that if a fellow 3ds owner passes you in the street the two machines will exchange data with one another whilst sat in you bag or pocket. It is a form of digital business card exchange.
Nintendo have, with this, gone and invented a whole new dynamic to social gaming in a networked world. You often bump into gamers online in games that you play at the times that you play them. i.e. fully distributed networks. With StreetPass you are bumping into gamers at a time and physical place which gives you something in common, and hence makes that person of interest.
What interested me, aside from the tech, was how this felt. Whilst I was in London heading back from the BBC I had my 3ds on standby in my pocket on the tube. I actually got off at a stop I did not need to, in this case picadilly circus, and walked down to leicester square in order to see if my StreetPass would connect with anyone.
This physical activity did in fact yield a few StreetPass exchanges. So when i got back on the tube train I was able to see a few Mii’s (the little avatars you create as a calling card/game character) now residing on my handheld. One was even from someone form Spain. My epredator Mii had also been delivered to them of course. I had, as an experiment also put Feeding Edge Ltd as my greeting so it was a kind of advert !
Mii visitors
These Mii’s also come with things that relate to games, such as a specific piece of a puzzle, or they can be used to drive a mini game. We are only scratching the surface of how this will pan out.
I had been playing a bit of Street Fighter IV which is tremendous game on the DS and has been crafted superbly. Part of that is the ability to win in game figures. These figures form part of a collection that can be traded wirelessly, but more excitingly you are able to assemble a fantasy fighting team from the figures.You are given a certain number of skill and attribute points that you are allowed to spend and then the different figures and characters can be user to create the team. Once created this can be StreetPass enabled. I obviously wandered past a fellow SF IV player as we basically exchanged team data. Once you spark up the game again it asks if you want to run the simulated battle using this data. I did, I won 🙂 in winning I gained some more currency to spend on more in game figures to build the team. It’s almost like play by mail rock/paper/scissors with a huge techie twist.
3ds SF IV team
Just to complete the behaviour altering loop though the 3ds also acts as a pedometer. It counts your steps, the more steps you do the more game coins you are credited with. These game coins can be used to purchase in game items. In the case of SF IV it is, yes you guessed it, more game figures to build the team with.
So, I was carrying a 3ds in my pocket, deliberately walked through the centre of London to see how it worked, gathered some other gamers data, played an offline game with that data which earned me more game points to be able to do that again and the act of walking wash also gaining those game points too.
I think this is going to be a fascinating twist, and may surpass the 3d elements of the nintendo handheld. It has shades of the Wiimote for being genre changing. In a world of online social games they have reintroduced the physical environment to the mix and I am sure some very cool ideas will spring out of that.
(I have not even begun to riff on the AR capabilities which are awesome too, more on that later)

Selling your friends down the digital river

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There seems to be a little bubble of interest growing in the social media trading site Empire Avenue. I only really started to take notice of it last night and created a profile and ticker for epredator

It even encourages you to increase you wealth by asking people to share links like this to sign up
I was intrigued as it reminded me of a site I was introduced to way back in 1998 by some American colleagues who said look at this. I was wracking my brains trying to remember it and luckily its still there HSX.com. My id has long since expired on that though it would appear. The aim was to get info about films and stars and to buy into them with pretend shares. As the time it was a very spreadsheet like site but told you about films that were in pre-production and you could place buy orders on them. I do remember I made a fortune though on a relatively unknown Helena Bonham-Carter as her career broke.
Empire avenue alters this formula and makes us all the stars and our activity on social media, as we link our accounts to it, becomes part of our “worth”.
I am always intrigued about the meta stories that can be applied to our web contributions and this is certainly one of them. Buying shares in someone, is that like friending or more “stalking”. Selling shares (not done that yet) is that a snub or just a virtual commercial decision.
It also reminds me of the political web based RPG erepublik where people live within a political system of work and taxes, but gather to be countries and provinces of interest. Rather like minecraft people manufacture virtual goods and produce that are bought and sold on the market. (I had not visited for a while so my citizen had died, but is now back in good health).
All these applications now wire nicely into facebook and twitter as the main substrate, yet do not exist in those environments. It is almost as if twitter and facebook are social media operating systems.
There is certainly more to be done in this area (thats what I am working on now in relative secrecy BTW ) 🙂

I never thought I would do a post about N-Dubz

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The flexibility of Little Big Planet 2 and the creative potential has gone mainstream.
N-Dubz ( A popular beat combo m’lud) have created their latest video using LBP2. I have to say it is brilliant!

I was recently writing a post elsewhere (link to follow) about the creative freedom of Little Big Planet 2. This is a prim example done really well too.
This video too from shows a whole range of game styles built using the LBP2 live tools on a Ps3

Take note Second Life….

Having a go with Kinect Hacks

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For reasons that will become apparent in a few weeks time I needed to see if I could get my Mac to talk to the Kinect using the brilliant open source OpenKinect.org. I don’t do too much in the command shell on my Mac so the realms of Homebrew and MacPorts mentioned in the instructions, whilst I knew what the point of them is, meant that my machine was in a bit of a state.
I had used something call Fink a while back, but could not remember why so I tried the Homebrew instructions but failed and had too many paths and bits not very happy to take what is a ready made package. So instead I went to the MacPorts compile it yourself path.
http://openkinect.org/wiki/Getting_Started.
The glview application then ran nicely and told me I had 0 kinects attached to my Mac 🙂
A prerequisite for this is to have the kinect with a power supply as opposed to bundled newer xbox and kinects where the power is built in. I simply took the Mac to the xbox, unplugged the USB from there and popped it into the Mac, ran glview again as a test. Bingo!
openkinect
openkinect
At its very basic mode you can see the colouring for depth being rendered as the predlets are nearer or further from the device.
Next step is to hook into the libraries and make sense of the data 🙂

Want to know about 3D GT5 – head over to Gamepeople

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I was recently asked (via twitter initially I should add talking to @GeekDadGamer) if I would be interested in contributing game reviews to the Gamepeople site.
Gamepeople logo
Gamepeople is a site where people review games from a personal perspective and with a niche angle. This perspective is different from the more generic reviews. There are reviews from a family perspective, both from parents and from kids perspective, sports and hobbyist specialists and the column I wrote some guest pieces for, the tech gamer column.
By way of an initial piece, and with the purchase of my 3D tv, it made sense to explore the additional features of Gran Turismo 5 in stereoscopic mode.
Gt5 3d no specs
So here is the resulting article, which makes more sense posted on Gamepeople than here.
It has been a while since I blogged as part of a team and it is good to have a watchful editor to get my wording and grammar tighter.
Following on from that I was challenged to write about the completely different experience that is Double Fine’s Costume Quest on the 360. The technical angle was probably a little less obvious than the 3D of GT5, but the gamecraft and production values, and the back story of having to re-appraise AAA development made for good article fodder.
There should be more to come so I will keep you posted 🙂 You can follow Gamepeople on Twitter and Facebook of course

Lets rock! – MIDI game guitars FTW

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I have to admit not really a musician, but I do like guitars. I know a little of the lead blues scale and a few chords. I also love playing Rockband. I have dabbled with plugging my old electric guitar into the usb port of the Mac but the socket in the guitar has a bit of a loose connection so its always a crackly affair.
Getting the MadKatz Rockband 3 guitar for christmas and seeing the midi connector on it I thought it was time to try and plug that into the Mac. I ordered a MIDI to USB which just arrived and … well it just worked.
Rockband 3 midi guitar
It got easier to play it than in Rockband 3 as you obviously play what you want, so it was much quicker to get comfortable with it. Rockband 3 could do with a free jam mode like it has with the drums for this purpose.
Garageband does things nice and simply but it is very easy to record and playback then change instruments or add tracks.
What was interesting was that the effects combined with my playing errors come together to sound not too bad. In this video I just played a sequence of C F and G chords and picked a few instruments to render that with.

I also discovered (as I am not sure its documented but if it is I have lost the instructions) that the start button on the Xbox guitar switches the guitar to a no strum mode. Simply pressing and golding the fret buttons creates the note and sustain. The X and B buttons step the instrument up or down octaves. I am not sure if the others do anything. As there is no Whammy bar you cant do any odd effects. Also the thing missing from buttons is string bend which is a pity but otherwise this all feels great fun and you can make proper music.
I also plugged the keyboard in, they slider effect worked nicely on that, but as I know even less keyboard I went back to the guitar.
I have been sitting noodling around the scales making up little tunes, playing blues lead on top of a few tracks etc. Every time I go back to metal strings on the real guitar, as I don’t play enough, the blisters are pretty bad. These buttons are not having any such side effect.
It’s great fun.
When I tweeted about this I got sent this link to an even flashier midi guitar by @mummabear, check this one out, the Misa digital kitara

Brilliant tech game counters

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I have, of course, been following all the tech and gadget news coming out of CES 2011 and there have been some interesting things other than stacks more TV’s and tablets.
This tech invention though is different, intriguing, tactile and clever.

Watching the video I love the tipping one cup into another that occurs towards the end.
Its not quite nano technology, but it is a breaking up of the traditional screen and device. Just as cloud breaks the processor/memory models up and spreads them this breaks the display up too. Nanotechnology separate individual pixels next? Now that would be interesting. Each pixel able to act as an independent physical unit based on its proximity to others.
So watch out for Sifteo 🙂

Product development crowds – Kinect hacks

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I have really enjoyed the explosion of Kinect hacks that have taken place in such a short period of time since the release of the Kinect. The technology of the Kinect is fascinating in its own right (you can read more from the actual engineers here)
However its the consumer use of the device on easily accessible devices that really is driving things forward. Previously games hardware is locked away with preferred developers, its hard for ideas to happen anywhere other than in the studios. Here however we have people trying out all sorts of demonstration applications, some are sensible, some are mad but they all really help drive forward the product development.
Microsoft were initially saying they were unhappy at this, but I find that hard to believe in this day and age as giving things over to people to experiment and share globally is crowd sourcing at its best.

Not every demo gets released as an opensource piece of code but many of them are using an open source base and a commercial product with the Kinect.
In many ways this will expose more people to the concept of open source development. Let face it most people would not really grok the open source and sharing interaction that goes together to make software like Linux or Droid or even Opensim. However when video pop up os a device they have only just seen in the shops and may indeed have, doing things that are not sat on the shelves of game shops it becomes very real and prompts the question how are they doing that? Why are they doing that? Why are some people just giving away what they have done?
No doubt the games developers are looking at all the hacks and getting seeds of ideas or seeing things as proof of concepts that will drive even better kinect games.

Kinect and motion sensing is not the be all and end all of Human computer interaction but it does work well for youtube and vimeo demonstrations and pushes the world forward. Now if the Kinect had been locked down as Xbox only and not hacked in this way there would have only been about 20 kinect applications whilst we wait on the more polished production of the the games companies.
Standards exist already as can be seen from this article from the excellent Kinect Hacks site which is a great place to follow this trend.

Hello 3d gaming

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I have now had to chance to spent a decent amount of time trying out my panasonic 3D 42″ TV. I have been intrigued by the demos of 3d content I have seen and in particular the consequences for gaming, and what prolonged gaming feels like.
3d gaming
There seems to be enough 3d content out there to warrant the upgrade. Xbox, Ps3(games and 3d blu ray), and Sky 3d all having things to offer
The first extended game I had was a few hours on Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3. Initially this was a disorientating effect using the in car view, the layers of HUD information being closer than the car details meant it was a little harder to take in the peripheral information from the HUD. After about 20 minutes though I think my brain adjusted and it became a very compelling experience. If anything it was braking that became more obvious, and some of the turn in points and reference points were more obvious. I have been playing driving games for a long while and have seen others struggle a little with the concept of slowing down for corners as unless you immerse yourself into the experience mentally you can’t feel the forces of the car. The 3d certainly helped with this. Spinning out was also a bizarre experience and it seemed to be quicker to deal with that and have the situational awareness.
Equally wearing the glasses has an odd bubble effect that makes it feel a bit more like it does when you get in a car. After the initial 20 minutes adjustment I felt no more odd finishing the session than playing normally.
Next up was Black Ops on the Xbox 360. Turning the 3d on was a bit more fiddly than in GT5 as the TV did not respond automatically and you have to select side by side 3d, the PS3 switches things automatically. (It seems Sky 3d doesn’t switch either).
The HUD crosshair is a little distracting initially as it breaks the immersion, there is an option to turn this off but that seemed to crash the machine! That aside the experience is brilliant IMHO. I had played through most of the game already but the last few chapters in 3d were amazing. The disorientated running around towards the end with the “numbers” zooming around was a stunning piece, and I am looking forward to going back and trying things like the first vietnam sequence.
However the test was really to play the online training multiplayer with bots and with @asanyfuleno. I found that I felt more in control and aware of my surroundings. I think this may be similar to the driving game mental model. I know that in FPS’s it takes me a while to feel the levels. I felt instantly connected to the environment and whilst this would still not equate to pwnage online I felt the 3d levelled me up, at least in situational awareness.
The view down iron sights and cross hairs is also remarkable.
As with the driving the glasses did not get in the way, but seemed to place you somewhere other than the room you are actually in. This was not something I was expecting to happen, but thinking about it it makes sense.
The third game was Tumble on the PS3 with Move. I have said before how fantastic Tumble is with the tactile feedback and I have to say it is very much enhanced by the feeling of space crated with 3d. The need to use the shadows of the blocks as reference points just melts away.
So a nights gaming on 3d was enhanced and from my point of view will only get better as we get more used to it and designers take advantage of it. I think being an old school gamer I will still play 2d games and with a 4 year old in the house (where the advice is to not use 3d for under 7’s) means we can’t do all 3d gaming yet. However as many of the games I end up playing are 18 rated that is not such a big issue.
There was an additional serendipitous happening when I purchased the TV from Best Buy, whilst waiting for the box to come out of the stock room I got talking to the head of the 3d TV section, who also happens to run a startup creating 3d displays(more of that in a later post). It was fascinating to be talking to someone who knew a lot about the subject. Its one of the reasons I like Best Buy, no pressure or hassle salespeople and when you do talk they know their stuff. This was by contrast with my experience when I popped into Comet to get an extra audio optical cable, the salesman was pleasant enough but when he asked if he could help me I was not expecting to have to explain to him what an optical audio cable was for. He also made the usual “pay more for cables as the signal is better” type of comment which for many digital things simply isn’t true anymore.
So…. shop in Best Buy!