Somebody at Bandai Namco is doing excellent design

I took my son Tom to Portland's excellent Ground Kontrol retro-arcade/pub for a little classic gaming.

They've done a bit of a remodel, the most significant piece of which greeted us upon entering:

Pac Man Battle Royale!!! And yeah, that's a big-ass cupholder in that cocktail cabinet. Welcome to America.

I played this back at E3, and it was my favorite game of the show. Picture a modern day treatment of Pacman (i.e. aesthetic of Pacman Championship edition), with the multiplayer head-to-head competition of Warlords, with a high level of emergent strategy that varies a lot depending on who your opponents are. Eat them? Bounce them into oncoming ghosts? Bait them into chasing you to a well-timed appearing powerup?

It's a superb new design on a classic game, and one that I pray they'll have the heart to ship on XBLA sometime soon, because going to play this at the arcade with 3 friends is easily a $50 evening at 2-quarters a game, per person. (Its also a superb redesign from the business standpoint, as there hasn't been a 4-player quarter eater like this Gauntlet, or maybe Daytona-USA, though the latter's cabinet price was steep).

Anyhow, my point is around it's superb design. I believe it's from the same team (at least same engine and look) that did Pacman Championship Edition, and Pacman Championship Edition DX for XBLA, both of which are awesome designs and very imaginitive twists on the original game.

I'm not sure if all three are from the brain of the same designer, but if so, they need to pay him/her more.

Anyone who thinks about game design should play all the classic pacman titles, but then spend some time with these three latest incarnations and think about what makes them so great. All very different, all still linked to the same core mechanic, and all great.

That's "Mister" to you.

Like all parents, I want to ensure my kids get a proper education. I believe that starts with a solid foundation based on the classics.

Which is why we took a break the other day from the never-ending Lego Star Wars gaming to introduce Thomas and Jennifer, aged four and a half apiece, to the classic Pac Man franchise. This way I could show them what games were like when I was their age (actually about 3 times their age when Pac Man came out, but I digress).

We started with Ms Pac Man because it's more forgiving. Then we moved on to the original Pac Man, at which point my daughter corrected me.

"Daddy, it's not Pac Man. It's MISTER Pac Man."

Tom likes eating ghosts. Jenny is interested in the part (on 360) when she is presented with a tally of which fruit she has eaten, citing that fruit is very healthy and that both Ms and Mr Pac Man will avoid getting sick as a result.

Pac Gentleman

While I enjoy steampunk sci-fi as much as the next guy, I don't have the faux-steampunk-object fetish that some folks have.

However, this steampunk rendition of Pacman (via Wonderland) is the exception. It's so awesome, I've been ruminating all morning on what it would take to build a working version using the same technique as was used for the mechanical pong machine.

Wacka Wacka Redux

Got around to playing Pac Man Championship Edition on Xbox Live Arcade tonight.

It's really quite good. Like most of the reviews are saying, it should have been called something else. Pac Man 2 perhaps. Anyhow, it's good. Check it out.

Long time no update

Sorry blogosphere, I've been busy. Work, kids, wife, getting ready for GDC, etc.

I also have to admit that I've sunk an ungodly amount of time into Saint's Row on the 360 lately. Just an hour or two a day but it adds up! Anyhow, here's an update on that and a number of other games I've had some time with.

Saints Row:

• Saint's Row is good, if you like the GTA-3 style sandbox games.
• I thought the missions/story/writing/etc was pretty good. No one's winning a pulitzer, but hey, it's as good as other high end game titles out there.
• I'm all for 'games for grownups', and with the language and content to suit it - where it helps the story. There were a few (not many) places where it was so over the top that it detracted from the story and felt more... adolescent. The escort missions (where you drive around a call girl and her client, trying to avoid the paparazzi while they get their freak on) were just over the top. Didn't add to it.
• A couple of the aside-from-story activities (eg. Hitman, Chop Shop) felt totally like a needle in a haystack. Even more true for the music cd's and tag locations all over the city. There was little in the way of a feedback mechanism to let the player know they were on the right track. For example, Hitman should have let you ask passers-by (by shaking them down, bribing them, etc) if they'd seen someone, letting you do the time-based equivalent of a sonar ping; "he was here 3 minutes ago".
• I finished the story long ago. The amount of work to mop up all the onesy-twosey 10 point acheivements is pretty high - so why won't I put it down?

Lost Planet:

• Played it through to end of first boss. Maybe that isn't enough to judge it but...
• ...I can't beleive people are rating this game as high as they are.
• Writing is attrocious. I know some of it is 'lost in translation', but even that's not the whole problem. THe story right out of the gate is full of holes, and then they plug those holes with cliches. Ugh. It's laughable.
• It's pretty. OK, that's good.
• The enemy AI is crap. Boss fights (well, the first one anyway) feel very 1990's.

Crackdown:

• Haven't played it yet, but I *have* it. Maybe tommorrow.

Pacman, Ms Pacman:

• I'm assuming you know these games. If you are an acheivment-chaser, these are pretty easy to bang through to get them all. I have 200/200 on Ms P, and 170/200 on Mr P. Getting all four ghosts with all four powerups on Mr P is pretty hard.

Root Beer Tapper:

• I haven't given this one much of a chance yet, but I'm curious how well I can get used to the controller. Tapper in the arcade was always a button-up/button-down dependant game, where the button was effectively replaced by a keg-tap-lever type of controller. The button might have been better mapped to one of the analog controllers?

OK. Back to GDC planning. I'm doing 3 sessions there. More on that in the next day or two...