I couldn’t find where Nickelodeon was selling the game but, they should be at some point. There is a lot of game that is not demoed in the web version including three side-scroller levels.

I think the game turned out pretty good. We don’t normally make games for such a young audience so, it was an experience! Hopefully some little kid enjoys it.

Pitfall won the award for the Best Spectacle! The trophy and medal are proudly displayed at the office of Tiny Mantis. So, thanks to everyone who came out to play at this year’s Come Out & Play event!

While having lunch in the Slope, a friend  introduced my wife and me to some friends,  a couple with children.  Upon finding out what I do for a living, the wife’s face turned white as she told me that I was “The Enemy”.  Apparently, it was a constant battle to keep her kids from playing video games.  I did my best to exasperate this lady (why is it always a lady?) All the while, I had to endure listening to her 10 year old boy whine and complain about how he wanted a Game Boy, poor thing didn’t realize DS had been out for years.

Another time, I got a similar dressing down from some lady at a lesbian party in the Slope.  This one claimed that she loved video games, translation, she played Centipede back in the day.  Nonetheless, according to this woman those old games were OK.  However, these new games, they’re BAAAAAAD. She was making the same old argument about how  games are more “realistic” and therefore had some evil magical power over the minds of our zombie like children.

Hell, I even get it from the kids in this crazy neighborhood.  One child told me that she goes to her friend’s house to play Wii but that she treats it like a “book” and then kept telling me how much she loved books. Guess what? I love books too! yay! reading is awesome…  this kid had been made to feel so guilty about playing Nintendogs or whatever  for an hour that she felt the overwhelming desire to cover it up with some nonsense that she felt would appease a grown up, which she sadly mistook me for.

The prejudice even invades the industry internally.  When making games for big media giants, like Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network or even Adult Swim, there is a double standard.  You can say and do things on TV that just will not pass in a game funded by the same organization.  We are self hating that way, or maybe its just our lawyers.

My students play a lot of games, they’ve literally killed millions of monsters, enemy soldiers, gangsters and bosses in their short but ludic lives.  To the best of my knowledge none of them would hurt a fly. I recently asked one of my students what his favorite game was.  He said it was Call of Duty because it was “so realistic”.  I then asked him if he ever felt guilty about killing people in the game.  He didn’t really know how to respond to the question it seemed so preposterous. I asked him how it compared to watching men die in Saving Private Ryan.  He said the movie made him cry.  Though it was difficult for him to express, he intrinsically understood that the digital actors he was killing in Call of Duty represented tokens in a game system, where as the real life actors in Saving Private Ryan were representing actual people, with actual lives even if the characters were fictional.

The problem lies in the observer.  Parents and other do-gooders see what their kids are playing as observers, or worse yet described to them by the mass media.  They  judge the experience from what Nick Fortugno recently called an Apollonian perspective.  On the other hand, the player views the game from the inside, what Nick referred to as the Dionysian perspective.  The terms come from The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzche and to summarize Apollonian art is the kind you experience as an observer like going to the ballet, where Dionysian art is the kind you experience as a participant like dancing drunk.  To the dancer it’s a little piece of heaven. To the observer who’s never had the joy of dancing drunk,  it’s obscene and should be banned.

I’m not saying games aren’t powerful, and I’m not saying games can’t make you feel.  They can make you feel a lot of things, fear, excitement, a sense of adventure, mastery, accomplishment, these feelings games do well.  Love, regret, sorrow, not so much.  There’s reasons for that, I don’t ever recall crying when I captured someone’s queen in chess, didn’t feel sorry for her one bit.  As a game player I understand that characters in a video game, no matter how “realistic”  are just fancier versions of that queen.  Are there exceptions? Sure, Shadow of the Colossus will make you feel for the giants, as you try to save your dead lover at their expense.  The game achieves this by breaking all the game design rules.

So, do I think 10 year olds should be playing M rated games, probably not.  Do I think 10 year olds want to play an M rated game… probably not.  I also think they probably would rather read Harry Potter than they would Lolita.  Do we actually need to regulate what is already a pretty internally regulated industry? of course not.  Does it make sense that stuff that would pass muster on prime time TV gets the dreaded M rating? of course not. Does it makes parents feel warm and fuzzy when lawmakers “do something about it”? Does it win votes?  You betcha.  Does all this nonsense bother me? No.  In the long run, it makes no difference, the demographics bear that out.  The next generation of parents will be a million times more savvy about games than this one, because they will have grown up on games.  A generation of drunken dancers… sounds great! I can’t wait!

So what’s my beef?  In a word: input.  How many tilting games can I actually play? More importantly, how many will I pay for?  Dragging games like Gal-Con show a lot more potential for growth, and that is the direction that I find interesting as a designer.  However, in the long run I can’t help but feel that there are whole genres of games that are literally impossible, or at the very least impossible to implement in a satisfying way.  There’s something about actual buttons that can’t be duplicated with a “virtual” joystick.  Go ahead, try playing Miss Pacman… it’s terrible, you just can’t get a good feel for it, though it is just an emulated version of the old game.  

The closest a  ”virtual joystick” game came to a somewhat satisfying experience for me has been “Hero of Sparta” by Gameloft a somewhat obvious rip off of “God of War”.  It’s a fun little game, and though their implementation is a little better I can’t help but feel that clicking on an arrow to jump just doesn’t feel as good as hitting a physical button with actual springs like on my old reliable PSP (1000 series thank you very much).   The act of having to constantly look away from the action to see if my finger had slid too far off the joystick, is annoying at best.  So as designers, I believe this is our challenge:  to make games that actually feel good on iPhone, instead of trying to reproduce the feel of buttons on a glass pane.  A tall order I know, but no more daunting than the poor slobs who tried to make a dot be a knight and a blob be a dragon on the Atari 2600.

That said, iPhone has one great thing going for it, and it has nothing to do with what kind of processors are in it. It’s the distribution mechanism.  iPhone has caused a renaissance in small game development.  Apple totally got it right, they take a percentage and developers get to put more or less any content they want on it at the price they want to sell it at.  Players get a really really easy way to download and pay for a game.  No cartridges or tiny proprietary discs, no warehouse shortages, no having to deal with Walmart demanding that you lower the price of your game, in a nutshell, no million middlemen between your game and the player.  

Could you imagine developers having that kind of freedom on DS or PSP?  It would be awesome.  To me this is the natural progression of mobile gaming.  So Sony, Nintendo, what’s the hold up?  Make it easy for developers to put games on your platform, as easy as Apple has.  It’s ridiculous that Sony says it may get out of the hardware business, and do what?  Your problems are easy to solve, just give the players what they want… An inexpensive clamshell device that has ergonomically placed buttons that don’t make your hands cramp up on extended play and oh yeah how about two analog sticks that are as good as the one on my Pocket Neo-Geo?  Add that to an army of developers who would kill to put their games on your platform by having a ridiculously low barrier to entry and you could at least give Nintendo a run for their money.  Nintendo are you listening?  No one cares about having a terrible camera on their gaming device or a terrible web browser either.  Guys, please remove your heads out of whatever orifices they are trapped in, and maybe just maybe, you could beat Apple at what used to be your own game.

As for what type of images our children should be exposed to, haven’t you noticed in other countries where “illicit” images are everywhere (nudity in Italy for example) that it winds up that the so-called illicit behavior becomes less highlighted, less risky.  Italians don’t walk around naked all the time, they understand where it is appropriate and where it is not.  They educate their children to shoo away the taboo and to understand the appropriateness.  I think that if we spent enough time with kids teaching them that violence is only appropriate in a fantasy setting that the whole argument of violence in games would dissolve.  (I also have to point out that a lot of the folks that disparage gaming have never actually played the games themselves.)  I understand that it takes a village to raise a child but ultimately it is the parent’s responsibility.

So here are some of the useful skills and beneficial effects of playing video games: challenges mental dexterity, improves spatial abilities, develops the ability to create and apply multiple strategies, develops critical analyzing techniques, helps the socially inept socialize, helps get fit (Wii), hand-eye coordination (I happen to be blind in one eye, so I can’t tell you how important improving hand-eye coordination really is), imparts education (historic, mythic, cultural), increased concentration, and encourages creativity.  I could keep going but I think you get the point.

You get NickPoints if you have an account with them. There is one particular power-up that is pretty cool. The Star power-up comes out after you have killed a certain number of jellyfish and then SpongeBob just goes crazy shoots out a ton of bullets!

There are no codes if anyone is looking for them.

Play Now!

Play Now!