Thanks Emp. Well I reckon there'll be next year. The plan for the incomplete 'Unholy' is to finish it off for some event called 'iFest' in April.

I always (as in, both times thus far) enjoy reading about your expliots at Gamejam. Long may it continue!

Maybe you should think about attending one next year, Andrew?

More good news on our game - we received a recommendation on Kotaku:

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/01/you-should-play-these-game-jam-games/

I have to admit I was surprised at this, simply because I thought they might recommend only completed games. But if I hadn't told you what the goal was, and that the game wasn't complete, and you picked it up, you might have been pulled in by the atmos and setup (which has a fairly open feel) and the ghost mechanics, and not even notice that you hadn't worked out what your over-arching goal is.

Thank you for making it through perhaps the longest blog post on this site :)

This is a story about team Dusk (which included myself, Wade Clarke) trying to develop the game eventually titled Unholy over 48 hours at the in-Sydney venue of Game Jam 2012, January 27- 29.

The brief of the jam is to form a team on the spot and develop a game from scratch within 48 hours related to a mystery theme which is only revealed when you show up. At the end, industry judges check out the games and dole out praise and prizes. This year's theme was given in the form of a picture, a ring formed by a snake eating its tail. The move from an English word cue (last year's theme was “extinction") to a visual one might have been made to help convey the theme to all participants around the world with equal force, getting rid of the English language issue.

My initial shock this year was at the explosion in attendance. While I guess 40 to 50 people attended last year's Sydney Jam at the Powerhouse Museum, this year more than 100 descended on the new venue of Rosehill Gardens Event Centre, a super high-ceilinged building beside a horse racing course. The jam was facilitated by the presence of the Sydney Gamers League: 350 of its members were having a networked game-a-thon in the Centre alongside the jam. Imagine hundreds of hardcore gamers and computers stacked in aisles for as far as the eye can see, with Modern Warfare 3 and Starcraft glowing on as many monitors.

Initially I was in a team with seven people, amongst them Tim and Jacqui who programmed our team's game Impacts last year. I'd also met Michael at the last jam, and had since done sound and music for his Flash game ZX Space.

Coming up with a game concept

As you've only got 48 hours, the organisers urge you to come up with an idea pretty quickly, then they hold a session where all teams pitch their ideas to each other. Jammers then have the opportunity to change teams if they like a different team's idea better or can find a better fit for their own skill set.

After a lot of frantic riffing on the snake-eats-self theme, our team's ideas for game mechanics fell mostly into the following three areas:

-- Playing a level multiple times and using your corpses as tools to progress through the level
-- Having ghosts of your previous plays help or hinder you on later ones
-- Having a series of characters die and play through the same areas (ala Eternal Darkness)

Over our catered tea (which was hardly stellar, and the first sign of the food hardships which lay ahead) our team split in two when one half came up with a new set of ideas involving a literal interpretation of the snake image; they would make a variation on the classic Snake game in which you don't control the snake but must somehow trick it into eating itself. It was called Ekans. Get it?

I was much more into the idea of making a horror game and doing something with ghosts, but what our two new teams agreed on is that they would share artists. That is, I would do sound and music for both games, and Michael and our new friend Leanne would produce artwork and animation for both games.



Members from both teams


Finalising the concept (OR DID WE?)

The ghost game team – which we called Team Dusk at some point – now consisted of Tim and Jacqui on programming, Michael and Leanne on artwork, Michael on animation and myself on sound and music.

Coming up is what I recall to be our initial game concept. I say recall because tracing the exact origins of ideas is always tricky (who came up with what and when?) and probably even more so over a crazy sleep and food deprived 48-hours.

The game is set in a village. Ghosts/demons are attacking the villagers for some reason. It's dark and scary and visibility is limited. The view is from overhead. You can try to flee the ghosts but inevitably one will get you. At this point, to survive, you need to attack and possess another human. When you're a ghost you have limited time to possess someone or you will die in a Game Over kind of way. To end the demon attack you have to find and put out 6 black candles hidden around the village, which were used by villagers to summon the demons in the first place.

Eating food at Game Jam

Food was sparsely dispensed over the course of the event (a euphemism) and not very good (euphemism). You had to hand in a voucher to get each meal, thus preventing you from stealing an extra two Weet Bix at breakfast, for instance, after realising that your breakfast of only the initial two Weet Bix had actually been a parody of a breakfast.

We had our own tea and coffee supplies in the Jam area, but no milk. The plastic spoons warped when you tried to stir your hot drinks with them. On day three I made an interactive sculpture out of three warped spoons, a coffee lid and a live fly.

The artwork

Leanne drew our cast of villagers with her graphics tablet. Her style is quite manga-ish, which gave the game a Japanese look. We had whittled the cast down to three types: a man, a woman and a little girl. Leanne came up with the man's design very quickly and I was impressed, though I did make jokes that I wasn't sure that men had such fashionable facial hair in whatever time period this game was set in.

Uh, what time period was this game set in?

Our game's background story was still vague on day one. Was this village medieval-rural? 18th century? 19th century? Early 20th century? And where was it? I had kidded that I wasn't going to be policing accurate fashion and grooming for the characters based on when and where we set the game, but I did start thinking about nailing down a setting. It had to make sense that these people were superstitious enough to try solving problems by summoning demons.

Handily, Leanne's design for the little girl had her dragging a teddy bear, which forced my hand. I thought that if it was a genuine teddy bear, the game had to be set after those became popular (post Teddy Roosevelt). Our story was not dissimilar to something Lovecraft might write, so I figured we could set it in Lovecraft country in Lovecraft times. On a piece of paper I wrote "Dunwich, 1924." Then I wrote a succinct introductory story intended to be displayed at the start of the game.

Animation

When Michael wasn't working on the snake graphics for our sister team, he took Leanne's village character artworks and animated them. He also came up with ghost versions for each character, and they all looked really cool. The ghost girl in particular was the kind to scare the crap out of you.

Sound and music Part 1

The first task I set myself was to produce music for team Ekans. One thing I realised about Game Jam last year is that you may have only a few minutes to demonstrate your game to judges and an audience, and you can really increase the value of your presentation with a good in-game soundtrack if one is appropriate.

I asked Dan on the snake team about what kind of music they might like. Their game was now set in an Egyptiany arena and had a crowd cheering on the player who was stuck in the pit with the snake. He suggested something jarring along the lines of the Kirk VS Spock gladiator fight from classic Star Trek. 'Duh duh duhhhh duhhhh duhhhh duhhhh duhhhh DUHHHH DUH DUH DUHHHH DUHHHH!…'

I thought that would be cool and funny and I went back to my laptop fully intending to go in that direction. As often happens in musicmaking, I ended up going not where I had intended to, but liking what happened where I ended up. I dropped in a 4/4 C64-sounding bass riff from Logic's library while experimenting, and that dictated the whole piece, just because I liked what was happening when I mixed it with Egyptian noises. The decision to continue with this piece and not go back to the drawing board was also the kind of time pressurised one you have to make often in Game Jam. I couldn't afford to lose the time I'd already invested in it.

To this track I added liberal doses of vocal yelling from various nations – Bollywood yelps, African chants, that kind of thing – to get a tribal feel happening, though the resulting mishmash was probably completely offensive to all of these cultures. I later pruned back some of the silliness and added my own melodic magic (™) to develop something that I thought would sound quite tense and exciting over the snake-in-the-arena game. When Matt from team Ekans checked it out and described it as "wicked and dark", I thought: "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!"

Programming

I had watched Tim and Jacqui do their programming wizardry last year, so I knew what to expect from them. They sit their computers side-by-side, work on different elements, occasionally merge them, occasionally communicate by ESP and occasionally by Tim raising his voice. Jacqui staves off sleep in general.

The main difference this year was that the process was less inscrutable to the other team members (or at least to me) because the gameplay was less inscrutable. The game we made last year was a high-faluting variation on Life, and there was no time for everyone to discuss every algorithm that was going to go into it. We just had to trust Tim and Jacqui to put it together, and they did. As a result, late iterations of that game kept surprising me with their new behaviours.

This year we had all discussed, argued about and contributed to the design of the game mechanics as a team, so as the code began to become demonstrable, we would look at each version of the game and see the things we'd talked about starting to function.



Screenshot of Unholy


Finalising the concept?

Late on the middle day, Tim told me he wanted to change the game design so that there would be a bunch of scene setting achieved through in-game dialogue before the part where you had to deal with the ghosts. Given the amount of time we'd already spent nutting out a design I thought would work, I was highly resistant to the idea; it threw up lots of new plot and game mechanic questions and contradictions that would all need to be solved, and change the nature of the beast so that you weren't thrown straight into a fearful survival situation, which I felt was a very pure mechanic well suited to the constraints of Game Jam.

We talked about all my concerns at length and were able to come up with answers to most of the new questions. For instance, when was the ghost attack going to occur now? We decided that initially the village could be a safe place and that the ghosts would be outside, but once you went out there (hopefully in response to curiosity piqued by the villagers' dialogue) you'd encounter a ghost and sort of set things off. Something I was adamant about was that ultimately, no place in the game should be safe. I didn't want the player to be able to hide in the village. I wanted the pressure to be on.

Of course what was intriguing about Tim's new idea what the prospect of recording some villager voices. Surely this would be a highly ambitious feature in a game made in 48 hours. Like he later said, “it's something you can brag about." I had also prepared myself technically pre-jam to record some dialogue because Michael had expressed interest in making a game including audio narrative.

I still had some misgivings about the direction change of the game, but since the solutions seemed feasible and the idea of doing dialogue was attractive, I agreed to it. Our challenge/problem now… at 2 AM of the final day, though you'd hardly have known it what with 400+ gamers and coders wide awake and still thrashing about in the building… was to get some people to perform the script Tim had written. We needed lines for the man, the woman and the girl. Cynical readers from Generation X will not be surprised to learn that most of the folks at Game Jam are men, so the first thing we did was approach the only woman who was both visible and awake at that moment, Jenna.

Recording the in-game dialogue

Jenna was famous at last year's jam for having built a robot; that was the interesting fact organisers wrote about her on the getting to know you sheet. We asked her if she wanted to record some lines and it turned out she wasn't interested, though she was encouraging of the idea that we should approach random non-jam gamers in the foyer, saying, "Hey, wanna voice a videogame?" – because she said that would be hilarious.

I can't deny that it might have been, but my sensible side thought we shouldn't. There was the potential for time wasting with people we didn't know and who weren't committed to Game Jam, but potentially a bigger problem was that the single location quiet enough for the recording of dialogue which Tim and I had scouted out and tested was in an unlit brickwork cul-de-sac outside the centre. Frankly, I would have been embarrassed to try dragging people I'd never met before into this dark alley at 2 AM with the promise of voice work in a video game.

So instead we dragged people we knew out there – me, Tim, Dan, Michael and Leanne. Tim's brother Dominic came along just to laugh at us, I think. Jacqui came along but was dead on her feet. We took turns trying different lines from the script, recording into my Macbook which was perched on a recycling bin in the dark. While I have directed actors in the past, I am certainly not one. I think Dan obviously has some performer in him. I don't know if he has any acting experience, but you could believe that each take with him was potentially a different person, one of those people being Dr Evil.

In the dark we ended up missing one of the lines, but otherwise we got everything we needed. I then worked on editing this dialogue into useable takes until 5AM, at which point I broke for a four hour nap. Listening to the recordings vindicated our choice of that quiet cul-de-sac; they proved to be extremely usable in their raw form, with almost no background noise and no need for post production other than level matching. They weren't even recorded with an external mic, just through the air into the Macbook's internal mic.

Having a shower

No showers were available until late on the middle day, at which point you had to book your shower and be marched down into the bowels of the facility if you wanted one. I got to use a shower set aside for female jockeys. I deliberately chose that one because when else does a man get to go into the female jockeys' shower at a race course? Never, that's when!

Sound and music Part 2

I love making Silent Hill-like music, and I also like making dismally sad sounding string music, so on the afternoon of the middle day of the jam I put the two styles together to come up with the in-game soundtrack loop for our ghost game. A low string grinds away beneath a bed of wailing and rattling. A harpsichord-like synth plucks a few notes overhead occasionally, and eventually the violin comes in with the sadness riff. I was extremely pleased with this track.

After the design change to the game involving the addition of dialogue and atmosphere-building in the village, I decided I would make a twin piece of music which would sound similar to the first one, but be the safer "pre ghost attack" version. It uses one of the same strings and some of the same riffs, but contains no supernatural noises and is in danger of being pretty. It reminds me a bit of the town music for Diablo, which probably isn't a surprise because our game has a slightly Diablo feel in the village, and Tim also mentioned the game when trying to describe an aesthetic for the lighting to Leanne.

I also created three soundscapes for what we called Ghost Hell. When you become a ghost, all the sound is blotted out except for a horrible noise from the ghost world, which should repel you and encourage you to try to get out of the ghost world as quickly as possible. I made a soundscape for each of the male, female and girl characters. For the man and woman, I used massively slowed down sounds of anguish and combined them with irritating tones and rattling. In the case of the girl, I slowed down the sound of a bunch of children cheering to about 10%.

Coming up with a freaking name

I wanted to call the game Black Candle but Tim really didn't like that. We thought of going with our team name, Dusk, which seemed evocative and to suggest all those being on the edge of one area (life, ghost life, death) and entering another ideas applicable to the game. But admittedly, there was no dusk in the game, only night. There was also talk of naming the game after the demon you would eventually defeat, but I'm glad the demon was never named or seen properly, and that as a result I never had to argue against this particular naming idea which I disliked intensely! We debated "Possession", but eventually settled on Unholy. Michael wasn't crazy about it, but he was outvoted.

The final product

By the time of the midday judging on day three, the game was about 85% complete in each of the three areas: art, programming and sound. Some sounds hadn't been put in (footsteps for instance) and the audio proximity alarms for the ghosts, and the reaper who kills the ghosts, weren't in either. A really neat addition, however, were the character portraits which appeared whenever you spoke to someone. And thanks to a random name generation library, every character had a unique period name which would appear alongside their portrait. Plus the names changed every time you played! The Japanesey artwork and RPG-ish dialogue really made the thing look Japanese.

The main thing that was missing was the programming for the candles the player is supposed to find to be able to win. In other words, the mechanics were in, but there was no goal. Obviously we still had a lot that we were able to demonstrate to the judges – people wandering the village, giving their dialogue, ghosts wandering around and attacking people, the reaper attacking ghosts (an awesome effect involving screen jitter and a huge black hand reaching from the ground as he comes near - Jacqui has a way with the effects) and the possession mechanic. We had to give our presentation about four times to different judges.

We didn't win any awards after the judging, but I definitely like – and am impressed by – the game we made this year. We do plan to add the candles and tidy up some of the programming and sound issues after Game Jam so that we will have a finished game. Compared to our game last year, Impacts, I'm more impressed with the volume of content we got in this year, especially at the level of quality that we achieved. The entire village map and graphics, including roofs which disappear when you enter the buildings. Three animated characters and their ghost versions. The reaper hand and his special effects. The ghost hell sound effects and a two-piece musical soundtrack, though the second piece wasn't implemented by judging time. We created all this stuff from scratch in 48 hours. Leanne had not worked on a complete game before, and I think secretly she was a bit of a star with the volume of excellent artwork she gave the team. I look forward to seeing and hearing the final iteration of the game.


Download Unholy here (Windows only atm, Mac build coming in future)

Tomorrow is Australia Day. The day after that it's Global Gamejam time again. I'm going to the Sydney venue where I'll contribute design, audio and music skills to one team as we try to cook up a whole game in 48 hours, Friday-Sunday.

In some ways, what I look forward to the most is the catered meals. They're the most tangible reminder that you don't have to pay attention to anything other than your game-making for 2 days. You don't have to leave the venue and you don't have to cook.

Cool. You should post maps of every day for this week, then slow it to once every few days / every week as the game progresses. (Since I imagine after a while, a map a day will become too much).

I'm playing through Longest Journey myself right now.

Wow, you're alive!

Also, this post is largely confusing in its vagueness.... So I'll just say, you should do whatever makes you happy. As long as you feel satisfied doing what you're doing, then nothing else matters.

Here's a weird thing I noticed online. Epic Dungeon is no more. It's now called Cursed Jewels or something like that with an extra class to play as.

I tried to read why, but can't remember. It just seems kind of lame because you and Joe have outdated reviews of a game that no longer exists in that form, I have a game I have no reason to review for that reason AND, most importantly, even if you have "Epic Dungeon", you still have to pay $1 to get this updated version. I mean, the money's no issue, but the principle of the matter is. To me, it'd be like if Bethesda came out with a patch for Skyrim where they fixed things, added a couple minor details, changed the name to NordWorld and charged you $50 more for it.

Since I'll be reviewing it in the next couple weeks most likely. Love the game, but am starting to get a bit tired of it. 150ish hours of something does do that.

1. Avoid Fast Travel when possible. I only use it to get back to base and/or collect quest rewards, but try to walk everywhere. The game's really attractive and immersive, but when you rely on fast travel, it really devolves. Which is why I'm still going strong after 150 hours. That walking takes time.

2. Most alive world I've experienced. Just the sheer number of quests you can get from just about everyone, as well as all the little randomized events that can happen as you're walking around the countryside.

3. If you play aimlessly with the purpose being to wander around and see what trouble you can get in to, it's near-perfect. If you play in a more regimented style, things kind of fall apart, as most of the game is based on a repetitive style. Get quest, go to dungeon, kill stuff, get item and/or kill boss, go back and get reward. If you're freestyling, you don't notice (or you notice, but don't care), but if you're planning to sit down and, say, knock off 4-5 missions for a guild or something, it kind of grates on you.

4. Even that's better than in Oblivion. Just because the dungeons look so much more varied. You might be getting sent to 30 different caves for fetch quests, but at least they don't all have the same general look.

5. Difficulty balancing is still an issue. Around when I hit the late 30s level-wise, virtually everything got very easy. It might have been because, thanks to smithing/enchanting perks, I massively boosted my armor rating AND added superior enchantments to everything. But, whatever, when you get to a certain point, it does get a bit depressing, as I went from needing to use stealth and guile in many situations to just being able to destroy everything with my fire-enchanted warhammer.

6. And by "stealth and guile", I mean "exploiting enemy AI issues". Hello, Mr. Bandit Marauder! You're a tough mofo, so how about I use sneak to peck away at you with arrows while you only make lackluster attempts to find me even though I'm only about 30 feet away! Man, I got pissed when I fought Movarth the Vampire, as he apparently regens health, so that strategy didn't work and I had to actually man up and fight melee style.

7. Gotten lucky with glitches compared to things I've read. Only quest that really glitched in any way was the Brotherhood quest where you have to assassinate a woman during her wedding in Solitude. Apparently, the town gets hostile and one of your DB buddies creates a distraction. Neither of those things happened and I also didn't get the reward for the perfect kill even though I did push the statue on her while she was addressing the crowd. The most annoying thing is that I did all three Bard's College fetch quests, but the special instruments never left my inventory, so I have 10-12 pounds of non-droppable quest items cluttering things up.

8. The inventory, for MISC items, is a bit glitched. Things don't always stack, which makes the list obscenely long. Also would have been nice if they created sub-menus for ores/ingots and soul gems and quest items. MISC just gets so long and cluttered.

Boo. No mention of me in here. =P

Haha. That's okay. I'm not doing one of these this year so won't even have a chance of mentioning you. So it's fair. :-P

Astonishia Story (January 1st) [PSP]
Hits: 962

So, it was Xmas again and my sister was heavily pregnant with her first child. This meant she could not travel very far and, in our immediate family, she lived the furthest away. Being the selfish child, she demanded we all go and spend Xmas with her, condemning me to three nights on the world's most uncomfortable couch. I didn't sleep much, so instead, I played the PSP a lot, which had been left sadly ignored throughout the majority of the previous year. Despite having access to Ys, I spent my time playing Astonishia Story instead, for reasons I still do not fully grasp.

So, there you have it. I had a cold, energy-draining holiday, and you got a review for a game you've never heard of from it.

Red Dead Redemption (January 8th) [360]
Hits:1994

I got R in the Alphas. Remember when we used to have tourneys? Good times, those. So, yeah, we had one and I won. With this review. That, according to Will that week in the RotW, didn't even make the top 3. Take that, you kooky Canadian!

It really was a ramble review. I'll never be a refined writer; my reviews are basically rambling on a word document then trying to make sense of the mess of worlds that stick at the end, but this really came out so much better than I expected. I never wanted Redemption to end, yet I knew it had to at some point, so I procrastinated as much as I could and still didn't complete every side quest or challenge. It gives me an excuse to revisit Marston's world now and then. And shoot people who probably don't really deserve it.

101-in-1 Sports Party Games (January 11th) [Wii]
Hits: 2006

Because, sometimes, you can have to much of a mediocre thing.

The start of this year was just about the end of getting review codes through the post for me, and this would have been a depressing end. Around the end of last year, I got a few 101 game collections, the majority of which were by no means awful, but hardly stand out. What they did do right was make a lot of the games insane enough for you play through just to see what they might come up with next. This collection just had a lot of broken sports stuff thrown in, most of which barely worked.

Medal of Honor (January 14th) [PS3]
Hits: 1175

So, at the end of 2010, I was approached by a gaming site of sorts who wanted to commission me to write a few things for them. I told them I would listen, and sold out a little. I hear it's the in thing to do. Anyway, I was asked to write something on Medal of Honor, which I'd previously done, so figured it wouldn't be that hard. I had a draft done by the end of the day, but they asked me to hold off because they had other things they wanted on the front page that day. I didn't care, so held off. No response a week later, so I gave them a nudge and was told that, that close to Xmas, they weren't bothered about getting new stuff on the page as traffic was culled. I shrugged and waited for them to response. New Year rolled by, and I nudged them again, were I was sent a message telling me I had taken too long to get the review to them, and that further commissions would need to be completed in a much more timely fashion. I didn't bother replying, and HG got a free review. Everyone's a winner.

Xenon 2 (January 23rd) [GEN]
Hits: 1162

Not even going to pretend to be humble about this; I love this review, and it'll probably end up being the best review I've written that no one will ever really read. I wrote it primarily at the end of 2010 for that alpha-marathon I remember caring about once, then deciding to save in for the next year when it was clear I had won. Joe destroyed me in the 2011 race, but I wasn't to know that then!

I'm glad -- happy, even -- that after this I never need to go anywhere near Xenon 2 again. Some things are best left to nostalgia.

ZPK2X (January 24th) [XBLI]
Hits: 1135

EmP: Remember at the start of the year, I said you should buy that live game with the kitten AK47 and zombie hoards?
DoI: Uh
EmP: Then mocked you for liking Unreal more than Quake III?
DoI: That's been going on for years
EmP: Never gets old.
EmP: I made a review intro from the corresponding nagging, anyway.
EmP: I'd forgotten about it until now.
EmP: Ever get around to picking it up?
DoI: I never did.
EmP: Almost exactly a year later, and I still might get the chance to mow you down with a kitten-shooting automatic rifle.
EmP: Isn't that, really, what a Christmas miracle is?
DoI: Now that I think about it, it does sound pretty magical

Cthulhu Saves the World (January 28th) [XBLI]
Hits: 1564

Much like Zeboyd's last Indie game, the dev shot me a message through HG mail to offer me a review copy. Unlike last time, I'd not already purchased the game and wasn't already most of the way through the title. But! Much like Breath of Death, the game rocked.

Stuff like this is what kept me glued to the indie service through the end of 2010 and the start of 2011.

The Ball (February 6th) [PC]
Hits: 875

The Ball turned up on my doorstep one day, much like a lost child nobody wanted and were looking to pass on. I am a charitable soul, so I took it in, played it through my PC (which struggled, alarmingly) and decided the kindest thing to do would be to then review it. I did. And that's how I saved February.

Still don't know why I bolded I remember twice.

Mass Effect 2 (February 28th) [360]
Hits: 734

Here's an odd statement. I put off and put off playing Mass Effect 2 because I know that as soon as I started, I'd play nothing but, and I didn't want to run out of game time so quickly. Hell, even now I have DLC missions I've not played because the thought of having no new Mass Effect to be able to play right now distresses me.

ME2 lived up to this ruinous self hype by being almost effortlessly better than the first game, which I still openly adore. I went into the review know I'd made a bit of a hash out of the review of ME1 by bouncing all over the world in an attempt to prove its vastness, so reined this review right back in. I'd learnt a few things when I took some risks with Red Dead that paid off, so reemployed them here. I'm more than happy with the result.

Thunder Force II (March 15th) [GEN]
Hits: 895

Man, I wish we could have carried stuff like this on. THE PLAN was to release a new Thunder Force review each day, and it's something we more or less managed to pull off. Flanked by site titans like OVERDRIVE (est 1845), MASTERS (obligatory Canadian) LEROUX (Missing, presumed drunk) and DarkEternal (Second best writer with �dark in his name) we went back to the obscure beginnings, ran riot through the 16bit era and came out the other side with JP-only imports. It was awesome; even if Jason's messing around with the coding then changed the colour scheme of the page and endured me to hours of further HTML coding, and his efforts now have sunk them into oblivion along with anything else I put in score box summery. But there is a bitter rant for another time.

Along the way to our great success there was betrayal, desertion and hissy fits aplenty, but we all looked forward to doing it all again a month later. Sadly, the disastrous �'Arnie' week, featuring games made off the back of California's former head of state, never came into fruition, and my grand plan of a theme week each month ended with this one glorious shot. I don't care; it rocked.

(Also, just in case it was in doubt, this won the RotW, and is, as such, THE BEST Thunder Force review on the site.)

Epic Dungeon (March 31st) [XBLI]
Hits: 927

I like to think of myself of a bit of a pioneer. It's one of those things that helps me feed my mammoth ego, but covering the Indie scene really did give me a lot of satisfaction; especially so when I knew people were buying games they would have otherwise never hard of based at least somewhat on what I'd reported. In this case, Joe beat me to the review of this game, but only because I'd gotten him into XBLI in the first place! You have a lot to thank me for, Joseph, and I've yet to see a gift basket.

Hydrophobia (April 14th) [360]
Hits: 934

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes dodgy, it's still such a crazy improvement on the game that first hit XBLA a year or so before, they might as well rename it. The recent update dropped the price of the game by half, fixed more or less every major complaint leveled against it, and left a decent survival horror-like game where your biggest fear is the environment.

Nevertheless, this review was a huge headache for me. I'd been writing pretty well up to this point and it was this review where it all started falling apart. I had horrendous writer's block and, as I always have done in the past, decided the best thing was to power through it. This led to several finished drafts but they were, to be blunt, absolute shit. Hell, this one isn't great; Bloomer rightly pointed out that it has a confusing voice where it jumps back and forth between the old and the new, but, by that point, I simply had to wash my hands of the thing and try to move on.


Beyond Good & Evil HD (April 23rd) [360]
Hits: 928

Despite the fact that this a cheaty rewrite of an older review and I still use large chunks of that review in this one, I really struggled to get this one out. It was probably the beginning of the end of my regular output because I got all kinds of frustrated that I couldn't finish the bloody thing so locked myself away in a corner until all three (I think three?) of the drafts were done. It was about then I decided I wasn't enjoying it anymore. I wrote out of obligation.

There's a little slice of drama out the way. I then won a RotW. Yay!

Alan Wake (April 26th) [360]
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I'm a bit of a survival horror junkie -- have you noticed? As such, I was psyched throughout the entirety of Alan Wake�es production. Then I purchased the game later than everyone else, because that's just how I roll.

Suskie and Marc (and most of the interested world) played this before me and gave very different accounts of their experiences. Through Suskie's excellent review, he made the game sound fantastic, and through Marc's constant bitching over AIM (which I've missed the most in my time offline) he made it sound like a one-trick pony. I guess I thought they were both right as I took the middle ground.

The second game is reportedly underway. I'm hoping they can build upon Wake strengths and perhaps dial down the trees.

Ravan Squad (May 2nd) [PC]
Hits: 614

This was a bit of a cheat. When I wrote for the original Raven Squad game for this very site, I also worte for another one which has since closed its doors. I reclaimed my earlier works, lest they fall into the pist of Oblivion, and posted them back up here. Or, at least, I did for this one. I had the others on a USB key along with a handful of drafts and recently found out it had died. It also had most of the Year in review on it, so I've had to write this entire list again from scratch with a much fuzzier memory. On the bright side, it means you, one of the three people to read in this far, have to put up with 33% less pretentious bullshit.

Shining Force II (May 10th) [GEN]
Hits: 841

It's taken me years to actually review this game, despite the fact I must have beaten it a good half dozen times while I've been writing reviews, and countless times before that. Shining Force II is my go to game. I have it on a USB key on my keyring so if I'm ever stuck somewhere, and there�fs a PC nearby, I always have something to do. This review came off the back of such a game; work was dead, so I spent more time playing Gen roms then doing what I was being paid for.

I actually have a very small list of games I want to review before I throw this crazy reviewing gig in, and, now this one's down, it's now almost exhausted.

B-Team (May 30th) [DS]
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Not everything has some story behind it. Sometimes I just play a game on a whim then review it. This was one. Rubbish, rubbish game thought it was.

Akane the Kunoichi (July 17th) [XBLI]
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We got a message asking us to review this Indie game because one of us used to be pretty hot on reviewing the Indie scene (it was me before I got lazy!) and so I did. I had heard of Akane's dev team before as I had downloaded the trial of their previous XBLI game, Ace Gals Tennis, and it was rubbish. I expected the worst on this account, but found an extremely worthwhile title included instead.

I should delve back into the Indie scene again should I discover the free time ever again.

Neptune�fs Pride (July 26th) [PC]
Hits: 835

Spared the label of �the longest review I've ever written by the absolute monster that is Oblivion, Pride is still a huge rambling wall of words that doesn't ever really delve into the obligatory trappings like how the game works or what the controls do. It's a condensed gaming diary, I suppose, that talks about my favourite subject. Me.

But, still, I love this review. It's easily the one I spent the most time on during last year, not just because it's huge but because I spent a lot of time editing it. It used to be a lot bigger, believe it or not, but I scaled it down to what it is now over several rewrites, and I wasn't going to publish the damn thing until I was ready. Hell, it was sitting in storage while I wrote B-Team and Akane.

Pride still weighs on my mind and you can expect something else to come from the game sometime in 2012. It�fs a fascinating concept, and I'm simply not done playing around with it and bragging about my results.

(P.S: Second RotW in a row. Watch the record break)

Dead Space (July 28th) [360]
Hits: 910

AKA: The review were Gary forgot who directed his favourite film.

Yeah, that was a gaffe, made better by a quick edit but forever immortalised by a bit of forum banter now stuck to the bottom of the review for eternity. No one to blame but me.

But, yeah, the review. Came out okay, didn't it? I'll assume you said yes, voiceless reader. Thanks, dude.


Trapped Dead (July 31st) [PC]
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I'd like to say it seemed like someone out there in Dev land still loved me when a copy of Trapped Dead showed up on my doorstep, giving me a perfect chance to be momentarily excited. A strategy game set in and around an undead apocalypse? X-Com with zombies?

Except, no. Trapped Dead is an ambitious RTS that plods on like the stereotypical foes that dot the game. One laden with bugs and errors that the games more likely to crash that have you get your brains munched on. Patches were released, but only in German, which made keeping to a review deadline pretty hard going. My German is a little rusty. Or non existent. One of the two.

On reflected, 4/10 seems a little high. Oh well.

L.A. Noire (August 13th) [PS3]
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Good old L.A. Noire. Like the slightly retarded friend you keep around out of pity, Noire could have (and kinda has) got by on just how obvious it was that an impossible amount of hours were ploughed into the game. The fantastic graphics, the highly professional voice acting and the stellar period-perfect soundtracks all failed the mask the fact that all they had been stapled to was a very pretty game constantly telling you to press X to win.

L.A. Noire is several steps too close to being an interactive movie and too far removed for comfort from being a video game. It doesn't so much as hold your hand, but lifts you up in a fireman's carry and dumps you face first into the solutions it wants you to find. Then, if you manage to mess that up anyway, it doesn't care. You win regardless. What a steaming pile of wasted potential.

The only noteworthy thing it did was allow me to write a review that won me a forth straight RotW victory thus granting me the highest streak record. Congrats, Team Bondi. Rockstar might now think you're a bunch of dicks, but you're alright by me. So long as you stop making shit games.

Fire Mustang (August 20th) [GEN]
Hits: 664

In my attempts to win RotW #5, Fire Mustang threw me for a bit of a loop. Out of games to review, I needed something I could beat quick and decided to jump into the crazy world of 16bit scrollers, pick out a dud, and there tear the sucker to shreds. People seem to love that kind of thing around here -- a sad commentary in and of itself. I was then quite annoyed to find the game was actually pretty good, and that I enjoyed it enough to sink all the time I had to find a new game into playing it. I was stuck, then. A praise review it was. I'd not planned on that.

Someone else won RotW that time around. Suskie even came out of the shadows briefly to try and end my run early, and I salute him for it.

Tropico 4 (November 6th) [360]
Hits: 481

Back in the hazy month of August, Jason and myself sat down to compile a large list of games we should try and get review copies from. It was a list of some size, and many e-mails were sent. One game arrived. This one. I was a little annoyed at first; I'd asked for the likes of Rage and Deus Ex, and I got bloody Tropico 4. Then the game very slowly took over my life. It's still the title I sink the most time into now. Hell. I�fve not even beaten Deus Ex yet because I spent more time building a civilisation on tropical islands instead, then watching the bastard people turn on me because I feed them nothing but rotten bananas, or sold their homes to criminal immigrants.

I'm currently in the midst of ruining a former partner. I've bought his company from underneath him, and am trying to have one of my pretty islands host the Olympic games, just to bankrupt him a little bit more.

Get to tha choppa 2 (November 29th) [XBLI]
Hits: 514

Man, I�fm clever. Have you read this review? Go do so, it's not very long, and I think you'll agree I�fm clever. Yes. Me.

Smart.

I'll start this year by strongly recommending a game I played in the 2011 Interactive Fiction competition. It's a dungeon combat game called Kerkeruip - it's a 'roguelike' if you know what that means. It's highly tactical and very addictive and challenging. I've played it at least 50 times. Each game last 5-45 minutes (mostly at the shorter end).

It is free to play. Just download the interpreter Gargoyle for your OS:

http://code.google.com/p/garglk/downloads/list

then download the Kerkerkruip 'Story File' itself from IFDB (other resources for the game are also linked on the right side of the page):

http://code.google.com/p/garglk/downloads/list

and drop the story file into Gargoyle.

Note - you definitely need to read the 3 page Beginner's Guide before you play. If you just go along spamming 'attack', you will be slapped down hard.

This is hardly a conventional text adventure game, but if you've never played any game like this before, there's also tute videos available where the author talks you through a game session.

I've cleared the game on Easy (wasn't all that easy) and Normal, but not Hard yet. The game also has its own achievements system.

I don't like it.

Boo.

Am I missing something? Shouldn't this be games of 2011?

I think my copy of Wizardry 8 vanished when my dad was moved into a nursing home. D= I'll have to see if I can find it on Steam one of these days. That game easily made my top ten favorite games of all time list.

Thanks. I certainly hope it doesn't go away.

My copy of Wizardry 8 vanished when my dad was moved to a nursing home. D= Maybe I can find it on Steam or somewhere, though. That game easily makes my top ten favorite games ever.