17th March 2007:

There’s so much speculation around the world about NiGHTS 2 at the moment, which means lots of people want to learn about the original game – brilliant! If you’re here from a link on a forum or just from browsing, I hope you feel welcome and enjoy reading about NiGHTS. Today I wrote another article responding to the NiGHTS 2 rumours, which you can read here.

All in all, thanks for coming and I hope you find NiGHTS interesting. If you have any questions I will do my best to answer!

NiGHTS into Dreams Part one – the score system

First of all, I’m certainly guilty of not playing NiGHTS as much as I should. I have put a lot of time into it (at least £500’s worth, I would’ve thought), but I keep telling myself I should play it more often, considering how often I bore everyone to death talking about how brilliant it is. The thing is that it’s a game of such rare quality I feel in some danger of somehow spoiling it; it’s an indulgence. If it were a cake it would be one of those massively fattening chocolate cakes with more sugar than most people can stomach (this isn’t to say I’m better than anyone, by the way.) Something like that, anyway. NiGHTS is a treat in the true sense of the word and, although it has more play value than almost any other game it should still be reserved for special occasions. I’ve deliberately not called it replay value as that somewhat implies you’re repeating things, but with NiGHTS you’re moving ever forward, exploring and discovering with every play. That’s down to some design ideas which still strike me as genius to this day.

The most important aspect of the game is its drive towards improvement by way of score; this system is so well-balanced it lends itself to almost infinite possibilities (though not scores.) Every item is worth a certain amount of points until you release the Ideya – at this point you get a bonus relating to how many seconds you took, and from then on all points are worth double. Simple. When you collect two or more items in quick succession you get a Link bonus – the more items you connect, the higher the bonus. Even one or two extra Chips represent an achievement when added to a Link.

For example, a course might feature two sections containing ten items each. If taken separately, the player will get two Links of nine – if she or she is able to connect them (through Paralooping or an extra item found somewhere) that can become twenty or more, which is much more valuable. This is an extremely simple example – more common in NiGHTS is the use of “teaser” items which promise massive continuous Links “if only” they can be used as connectors. The first time the player successfully achieves that continuous Link forms the achievement/satisfaction stage – the player has proved his or her goal to be attainable, and often recognises the quality of the game design and the understanding of the player’s mind.

After this achievement has been repeated (even improved) a few times comes the “expectation” phase – the player has proved it can be done and now expects him or herself to achieve it the majority of times. Failure to do so often results in increased determination in the player, an incorporation of stage four. In other games such failure could easily lead to frustration and eventually rejection, but in NiGHTS the margin of success* (not error) is so slim that the player knows it would only take an incremental improvement to fulfil his or her expectations. Either way, the sense of satisfaction more than compensates for any frustration the player might feel at their incompetence; if it were so easy to achieve, the sense of pleasure would be considerably reduced.

The stage of expectation is shared with that of altered objectives – the player has demonstrated his or her first target is attainable, and so begins to conjure up other ways in which their score could be improved: getting to the Ideya Capture a second earlier, executing a tighter Paraloop to save more time. Again, the margin of success for these targets is often extremely slim, but a brilliant consequence is that these skills are transferable across all courses; there are familiar item layouts and sequences in many courses, resulting in similar opportunities for continuous Links and so forth. This creates a cogent, ever progressing score narrative* encapsulating the entire game – a high score in one dream is likely to enable you to improve in another and so on. In this manner, the levels are connected through the player’s development, not the plot’s; targets achieved influence the player’s expectations and confidence as well as their abilities and awareness of what is possible within the game.

I’ve tried to investigate and theorise the NiGHTS score system as best I can, but there have been inevitable omissions, particularly the boss multiplier system. What’s here, however, is (pretty much) most of what I think is important to NiGHTS’s score-improving ethos.

Margin of success – the distance between fulfilling and failing the desired objective. Score narrative – the progression and improvements the player makes in his or her score over the game’s lifetime.

Hi everyone,

I updated the Harvest Moon Diaries to include another two years of Farmer James’s life. Please read it and enjoy it!

I’ll be keeping the Sonic-themed design for a while yet, as it took me a long time and I think it looks great. I celebrated the special day by wearing a Sonic badge to Uni, playing some Sega Superstars and baking Sonic a special blue cake with blue icing. Here’s a word of warning on that front – although food colouring is non-toxic, that doesn’t mean lots of it will have no effect.

Just to prove it was blue all the way through.

Sonic City has some great birthday wallpapers, screensavers, an iron-on t-shirt transfer and a competition to win some very nice Sonic-themed prizes. You need to be a member of Sega City to get in, but that’s free and takes no time. You could even try www.bugmenot.com

Sega of America, being useless, made little mention of the happiest day of the year apart from a small picture and a revamped site for the next-generation Sonic the Hedgehog title which, in my opinion, could well be total rubbish. Apparently this one features a telekinetic hedgehog from the future and Eggman kidnapping the “Princess of Soleanna”, and is Sonic’s first time in the human world (then what were humans doing in Sonic Adventure?). We’ll wait and see on this one.

In other non-Sonic-related news, I recently updated the music section to include another song from my album “Long Distance”. I’ll be regularly uploading songs both old and new (when I get some new ones!), so please check back regularly and feel free to leave comments on pages to let me know what you think.

Don’t forget you can subscribe to my RSS feed using http://www.prosody.co.uk/feed/, and if you see something you like feel free to comment or trackback it, or pass it on to a friend. Thanks for reading!

It’s my very favourite hedgehog’s 15th birthday today, and to celebrate I’ve made a very special Sonic design for the blog! It took me bloody ages so it might stay a while, but it’s my way of showing some love to Sonic.

Later on I’ll be baking a Sonic cake, photos of which will be online afterwards. I think I might also celebrate with some Sonic games, and by wearing Sonic badges and possibly even a t-shirt.

I do hope you will celebrate with me on this momentous day.

Introduction.

This article is part of a joint-blogging project with my brother over at Sodaware.net. Every two weeks we will be looking at some of the best games ever made and taking two very different approaches to them – I will be dealing with a very player-oriented angle, whereas as a game developer Phil will be examining the game’s design and production to see what lessons game developers can learn from them.

The accompanying half of this article is over at www.sodaware.net

What is Shining Force III?

Shining Force III is a roleplaying game for the Sega Saturn console in 1997/1998 that uses a turns-based battle system, rather like chess. It was released in three separate scenarios, although the second and third scenarios were only available in Japan. It remains my favourite RPG of all time, despite very scarily being almost ten years old now.

Mixture of gameplay

I think one of the principal factors in Shining Force III’s (SFIII) appeal is its balance. Nintendo’s Fire Emblem series uses an almost identical battle system, but loses out because it fails to develop its characters and world as successfully as SFIII. The gameplay in SFIII varies from hardcore tactical battling to more open-hearted town exploration, and your journey through the SFIII world takes in cursed ghost towns, rich autumnal castle towns and everything in between.

It’s this creation of a sort of networked world around the player that really sets this out as an accomplished RPG.

Towns feel like they belong together in these countries, and although they’re all sufficiently different to mark them out they have a very familiar and recognisable style. Villagers, too, are all individual but not bizarre; it’s an RPG that focuses on a coherent world rather than trying to show how many different races and wacky ideas it can fit in. You really get the sense that this world hangs together.

Although SFIII does include traditional epic-fantasy RPG elements of great evil and resurrections and so on, it also has a very grounded and quite serious plot involving two warring nations, and the decisions that have to be faced by those lands’ leaders. I’m not going to pretend that it’s an in-depth political commentary, but it does help to frame the impending huge-scale disaster by including more realistic issues of famine and refugees.

Brain Training

What else is it about Shining Force III that captured me? Well, it’s a game that needs brain power. Not in the puzzle sort of sense, but the battles certainly require brain power and strategy of the highest order. The comparison with chess is probably a little strong here, but you do need to calculate several moves in advance against the larger enemies to figure out who should go where, when and what they should do. Some battles, not content with facing you against squads of highly tough warrior dwarves and hooded mages, include refugees to rescue or ancient temples to explore. These optional diversions really do help branch out and develop the battles by allowing a degree of differentiation – the player has control over as much or as little of the battle as they want. Don’t want to rescue the refugees being persecuted by the Empire? You’re heartless, but it’s your choice.

TimeSync

Following on from this, the decisions you make in Scenario I affect events in the other games through Camelot’s “Synchronicity” system. When you finish the first game, you create a save file which can then be used at the start of the second game. As all three games happen simultaneously, and use some of the same characters, locations and events, your actions have consequences for other characters. Getting to see the same events from different perspectives is also a refreshing idea, and although the second and third discs were in Japanese, I find it rather intriguing to think about the subtle differences there would be in how each side sees the same situation.

Summary

RPGs are supposed to have elements of fantasy, but there is only so far the player can suspend their disbelief when considering the world presented to them. Generally, elements such as fantastic creatures and magic are accepted because they relate to the player’s imagination, and often I think the player wants to believe in them. I want to believe in birdmen and magicians who can summon the phoenix and so on.

For an RPG to stretch the player’s imagination and yet remain mostly acceptable, it has to operate within some form of logical boundaries. Shining Force III does this brilliantly by creating towns and villagers that fit together by not always being outlandish, almost garish characters. The game’s small details all combine to create a background to one of the most involving games I have ever played.

For the other half of this article, be sure to head over to www.sodaware.net/blog to read a really interesting look at the game and what lessons game developers can learn from it.

Menu screens.

Everybody LOVES menu screens. They let you choose so many things – game modes, characters, options, levels, save games. Wow, that’s five awesome things right there. Who doesn’t remember such classic game moments as “Ranking Mode”, “Game Speed 8 Selected” and, of course, “GAME SAVED”? Wow… such memories.

Menus are great. If I were to record a radio or television programme about games, I would make sure I included as much footage and discussion�of the game’s menus as possible. How do you know whether you’ll like the game unless you see someone carefully moving the cursor up and down? “Story mode… multiplayer mode… edit mode… options…”

Do you disagree? I should bloody well hope so.

Menus are BORING and NOBODY LIKES THEM. The best thing about games is what happens BETWEEN the menus. This is called THE GAME.

This post has been inspired by the single greatest videogame programme of all time – GameLife. I love this show – really. Probably in an ironic way yes, but all the same I have a lot of admiration for these guys. I remember the time when recording a video or a radio show was cool; I used to record Sonic stories on a cassette player so I could listen to them. I made a Sonic newsletter in the days before the Internet, and it was cool. Yes, the Internet has ruined everything.

The guys from GameLife are doing the same thing – making something creative and cool about something they love. Unfortunately, the Internet has happened and they will probably get mauled for it, but I salute them. Their website is http://gamelife.exehq.com – please visit them, watch the videos and enjoy yourself. Relax!

I remembered this article while applying for a TV documentary; some of these numbers were far, far too low.

When Simon Adcock told me about Harvest Moon on the GameBoy Colour years ago, I remember laughing at him and telling him a farming game sounded boring.

Clearly I was a very, very foolish youth, but I believe I’ve made up for lost time. However, exactly how much time has been lost to one of the largest timesinks ever? Let’s see.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

This is the first Gamecube version of Harvest Moon – HM: Magical Melody is due in March 2006, which is brilliant – and happens to be phenomenally addictive. It’s so addictive, in fact, that I’m on my second copy as my first one decided to get itself a new owner. Anyway, let’s take a look at the figures…

Each day in HM:AWL takes about half an hour or so, and there are 40 days in a year. Therefore, each year is about 20 hours of gameplay time; quite a considerable amount. I am currently about to finish my fifth full year on the farm (I’ve done a whole year in the past week or so), which means I’ve put about 100 hours into it. That is officially “a lot.”

Now let’s take a look at the handheld version, Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. Again, I’m on my second copy of this as my US version (brought across from America – best. Birthday present. Ever.) wouldn’t connect with my European HM:AWL. The days are much shorter in FoMT – about ten minutes, if that – but there are 120 of them in a year. So that’s about 20 hours a year again (funny how that works out!). I seem to think I was on my fifth year in my first version, and now I’m in the Summer of my third year, so that’s about two and a half years. Seven-and-a-half times twenty is about one hundred and fifty hours – that’s a lot of bus and train journeys, not to mention entire days laid waste to its inescapably addictive charms.

So, as a very rough estimate, about 250 hours of my life have been sacrificed to the deities of Harvest Moon. In that time, I could have:

Finished one novel and started a sequel;
Tested the limits of human endurance by going without sleep for over ten consecutive days;
Earned over £1,000 working a crappy minimum-wage job;
Probably cracked PSO Ultimate mode;
Improved as a musician by an inconceivable amount;
Thought at great length about how to improve the world, and come up with several clever ideas for implementation;
Actually done something.

The third point is quite a pertinent one, really. I’m not one for jobs, as you know, but to think that I could have actually earnt some real money instead of in-game gold is quite funny, really. Doing any of these things, however, wouldn’t have earnt me any genuine insight into the world of farming, which I value above (most of) these.

If that’s what I could have done in the time I spent playing just TWO games – about FARMING, for fuck’s sakes! – how much more could I have got done if I hadn’t played ANY games? Well, to calculate that I’d need to work out how many hours I’ve spent playing games in total, which isn’t really possible. Here are some fairly general figures, though:

About 250 – 300 hours on Phantasy Star Online;
About 300 – 400 hours on the Shining Force III trilogy (I think – this one is hard to work out, really);
About 50 – 100 hours on Transport Tycoon Deluxe and Locomotion (just a guess, really; probably much higher);
Somewhere in the region of 100 hours on various Sonic games (probably much more, but about 50+ on Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2) this is a joke. 100 hours on Sonic games? That needs doubling at least. We’ll go for 250.
70 or so hours on Paper Mario and Skies of Arcadia Legends (combined).
Pokémon Ruby, FireRed and Colosseum have sapped about 200 hours or so.
SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighter’s Clash! (Best. Game. EVER.) – 52 hours.

I can’t imagine the amount spent on all the other games combined – NiGHTS, Burning Rangers, Mario Party, Fire ProWrestling, WarioWare Inc., Shining Soul, SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium, Neo TurfMasters (LOTS of hours in those two) have all sucked a lot too.

By now I think I should be beginning to realise exactly what my gaming addiction has cost me in terms of money, friends, skills and tangible achievements, but in truth, I can’t help think about how truly awesome these games are, and how happy I am to have spent so much time with them. I know, it’s super-geeky, but it’s the truth. Pretty much all the games I’ve mentioned here are masterpieces or very close to them, and are all brilliant experiences I’m more than happy to have enjoyed. For the purposes of closure, however, let’s try and put a figure on it.

Total hours spent gaming (taking a median value where I’ve made vague guesses):

About 2,500 or so.

I originally said about 2,000, but that’s pathetic. It’s probably even above 3,000, but I’ll go for 2,750. Edit – every time I look at this number it seems far too small. I think that’s partly because I want to feel my time has been worth more than £15,000, but I think I’ve also been quite inaccurate. I don’t get much time to game any more, so it’s strange that this number should keep rising so significantly, but it’s mostly a reflection of my attempts to pin down a final, definitive answer.

3,500 hours x £5.50 = £19,250

That’s still shit. I’m glad I stuck with my games.

I can’t tell if this advert for Super Mario Sunshine is serious or not.

This advert for Sonic 2 and a Mega Drive smacks of Sega’s 90’s advertising ethos.

This German advert for Zelda: A Link to the Past defies description.

These Sonic Adventure adverts are amazing.

One of my genuinely favourite adverts for one of my genuine favourite games.

Have YOU played Atari today?

There are so, so many more I could post, but I think it’s in everyone’s best interests if I just encourage you to visit http://gameads.gamepressure.com/tv_games_commercials.asp

Quite possibly one of the best games I’ve played this year. I’ve been after it for a while because it sounded inventive, and I like inventive things, but I obviously don’t like them enough to splash out £20 for them – I didn’t buy Boktai until I saw it for £10 in Playtime last week. I picked it up then though, you’d better believe it. Here’s what’s so good about it.

The cartridge has a solar sensor in it, which is similar to a solar panel – it absorbs the Sun’s rays and puts them to all kinds of uses. On very sunny days you’ll find the game much easier as your gun charges up quicker, special plants grow quicker and everything is much better. The sensor’s main use is charging your weapon, the Gun Del Sol, but it also affects the game in other ways; a dungeon may be dark until you step into the sunlight, at which point the dungeon lights up and you can see where you’re going. Similarly, in a later level the sunlight affects the strength of the wind – if you want to get out of the wind in-game, get out of the sun out-of-game. It’s a brilliant merging of the player and the character in a way I haven’t seen done before.

It was beautifully sunny here yesterday morning (the game told me it was “one great Boktai day”), so I went outside and put the old GBA on. The Sun’s strength was at six out of eight bars, which is very good indeed, so everything was going smoothly – vampires were vapourised, plants were grown, ice was melted and so on.

Just as I got to the second part of the boss, however, the Sun disappeared behind a cloud. Argh! The sunlight dropped to a measly two bars, meaning my gun wasn’t charging quickly enough to replenish the sunlight I was using to keep the boss under attack.

My ammunition soon ran out, leaving me to snatch a few seconds of charge when I could, but the boss was clearly overpowering me. I was losing.

I looked up, and saw the Sun straining to get out from behind the clouds. There were big clouds but they were passing quickly. A few seconds later the Sun escaped from its vapoury shroud and shone golden beams upon me and the solar sensor. I honestly grinned and cheered when it happened.

The sensor went up to six and within a few seconds my gun was back to full ammunition. The boss never stood a chance.

THIS is why Boktai is a great game. The first thing I do when I wake up is check to see if it’s sunny outside, and what my chances of getting some good Boktai-play are. I’m going to go into Nottingham and buy the sequel soon.