Reflections 2004 (Part 3): Game makers, critics look back

Welcome to the third and final installment of our Reflections 2004 series, a collection of insights from industry insiders assembled during the holidays by Salon.com games writer Wager James Au.

Last week, we brought you the second installment, which featured thoughts from IDC analyst Schelley Olhava; Sony Online Entertainment chief creative officer Raph Koster; developer Doug Church, who recently joined Crystal Dynamics; Valve writer/designer Marc Laidlaw; and multiplatform developer Greg Costikyan.

In today's final roundup, we will hear from: game scholar Robin Hunicke on her "Relax-and-Enjoy Top 5" for 2004, America's Army game consultant Maj. Jason Amerine on his four favorites of the year, Matrix Online designer Brian Yeung on some of the major shooters, game lawyer Alan Behr on the future of game-related law, Shacknews.com co-owner Maarten Goldstein on the overuse of bump-mapping, and GameSpot freelancer Eric Wolpaw on what it's like to sit in the game designer's seat for a year.

Robin Hunicke

Her favorite games of 2004:

I am a busy girl. And while I'll invest downtime in games, I don't want to feel chained to them. I'm thinking about hard problems all day, dealing with first-person shooters. So when I play, I want to laugh, smile, and explore freely. Here's my "Relax-and-Enjoy Top 5" for 2004:

5. Mario Golf: Advance Tour: I can't play golf to save my life. My brother is an aspiring pro, but I can beat him at this game! Don't let the coloring-book landscapes and goofy characters fool you. It's an accomplished, challenging simulation. You can do 18 holes in about an hour, and it's a bit longer if you play with a friend. I recommend choosing Yoshi as your avatar, because even his bogie animations are adorable.

4. Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga

3. Kingdom of Loathing: KOL is a web-based, three-stat RPG with stick-figure artwork. You get 40 turns a day, and the currency of the world is "meat." So, you adventure a bit, earn some meat, talk to friends about the silly items and puzzles...it doesn't sound very new or thrilling, does it? But the writing is great--full of pop-culture references and gamer in-jokes. Funny as in "Ha! Ha!," not "You dork!" (Though there are some puns). I know seasoned, pessimistic developers who dote on this game, as well as men who have lost their wives to it. So the KOL folks must be doing something right.

2. The Sims 2: In this game, you can make a virtual version of just about anyone you know, right down to [what you think are] their inner drives and desires. Then you can build them a house, help them find a career, and watch them fall in love, get married, and grow old. Or...you can torture them! There are so many systems to explore in this game that it's easy to get lost in it, when you should be doing your laundry. I would complain about that...but really, which would you rather be doing?

1. Katamari Damacy

Her predictions for 2005:

I'm excited to see how the Katamari Damacy sequel develops. I'm also looking forward to Wanda and Colosus, because I think they will expand upon the work they started with Ico, creating characters you really, truly care about.

And then there's the Nintendo DS, which blends all my favorite portable game features with a touch screen and ad-hoc Wi-Fi. I've only managed to play Feel the Magic: XY/XX so far, but it's already got me dreaming about new kinds of gameplay and interactivity.

Robin Hunicke is a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University for artificial intelligence and games, and she's a participant in this March's Indie Game Jam. She's the co-organizer of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and will teach at the GDC Game Design Workshop. She also publishes a blog called GewGaw.

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Maj. Jason Amerine

I was very bored by most of the games that came out in 2004. I just didn't see much originality. Rather than bash on the disappointments, I'll give my top four. I will readily admit that this is a strange list, but I grew up on a C-64 when Ultima was still in the single digits and run off a floppy.

4. Delta Force: Black Hawk Down: Team Sabre: A lot of fun and washed the bad taste of Battlefield: Vietnam out of my mouth. I liked all the weapons, enjoyed driving or piloting all the vehicles, and was very satisfied whenever I played.

3. Painkiller: My third favorite, stemming from its originality. The weapons were a lot of fun, especially the stakegun, and the monsters tended to be a bit emotionally disturbing.

2. Star Wars: Jump to Light Speed

1. Far Cry: The single-player game was fun, exciting, and beautiful. The AI was very good, to my surprise. I also really enjoyed the variety of weapons. My favorite chapter was one on an old World War II aircraft carrier. I was always a WWII buff, so I found that mission the most intriguing. Unfortunately, the online play was terrible. It was a game with so much potential that just didn't quite pan out in multiplayer. I hope their sequel makes up for those shortcomings. I will be first in line to buy it whenever it comes out.

Maj. Jason Amerine is a Special Forces officer who works as a technical adviser for the America's Army computer game.

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Brian Yeung

Some of his favorite games of 2004 (in the order they shipped):

Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow. Ubisoft was able to make a multiplayer stealth game for players who survived the steep learning curve and were able to find quality teammates and opponents. That such players exist is a testament to how well designed and fun the game was.

Halo 2: We were still playing the original in epic LAN parties three years after it shipped. But now it's better and on Live, with new maps and game types, more balanced weapons and vehicles, and a brilliant lobby system. And have you seen their RSS feeds for your recent games?

Half-Life 2: Utterly beautiful and immersive. Because of the facial animations, I actually care about NPC sob stories, which helps sell the feeling of oppression and desolation. While some argue it's too easy, I think the designers have done a good job of creating a cinematic experience. I trust them to make it challenging without being frustrating, and I don't quicksave every few steps or backtrack for health.

His top trends from 2004:

There seems to be more diversification in MMORPGs, and players are realizing that they're not all the same. Easy-to-pick-up games, such as City of Heroes and Puzzle Pirates, are doing well, and titles with strong IP, like Worlds of Warcraft, are beating EverQuest 2 at their own game. Sites like TerraNova help bring light to those differences, and they explore the socioeconomic implications of game, community, and EULA design.

Also, FPS titles seem to be moving past the WWII fetish, where, for a while, it seemed like everyone was trying to re-create the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

His predictions for 2005:

Having both Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 come out in the same year means lots of upgraded PCs, a higher minimum [technical] specification for [games] next year, and a little more freedom for developers.

Brian Yeung is a designer currently working on the Matrix Online from Monolith Productions. He keeps an occasional blog, Cranky User.

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Alan Behr, Esq.

His take on key legal/IP rights issues for the game industry in 2004:

What we have seen in the past few years, especially from federal courts in California, is a small but important body of precedent that has helped the law catch up with technology. What happens in games, as in other cutting-edge technology and art, is that the law has to take concepts and principles from prior generations and attempt to apply them to new and often unforeseen advances.

For example, courts have given the green light to emulation. Generally speaking, people who have worked to save historic games developed for legacy systems by creating software for the use of those games on contemporary PCs can therefore continue to do so. On the other hand, in a case in which I oversaw the winning legal team, we now know that unauthorized level disks made of user-created levels that had been posted on the Internet cannot be sold commercially by third parties, as had been widely practiced until the late-1990s.

What lawyers are having trouble wrangling with in 2004 is the exact definition of what is and is not the licensed platform for the deal. That sounds easy to define, but I was once at a conference where two hundred IP and IT lawyers could not collectively come up with a satisfactory definition for the word "platform"; if anything, the problem is getting worse. The complication is that there are so many convergence devices coming down the pike, with so many multiple functions. With wireless Internet going mainstream, you can imagine that there are many game lawyers right now running back to contracts signed in the mid-1990s, when everyone thought the Internet was simply a wired medium and little (if any) thought was given to wireless. The list goes on, but it is going to take years to sort it out--until the next new thing comes along.

His predictions for 2005:

For 2005 and beyond, I think that the shoe that has not yet dropped is the question of patent rights. There are many patents for game-related developments, and there have been attempts from time to time to enforce those patent rights. Meanwhile, we still see developments coming out that look to be potentially patentable but for which no patent has been obtained. So we, right now, have a curious mix: patents that may or may not be enforceable for technology that never took off--even as money may have been left on the table due to the failure to secure patent rights for hot tech. It will therefore be interesting to see whether patent protection starts to become more of a priority.

Alan Behr is a partner in the New York office of Alston & Bird, where he heads the Electronic Entertainment Task Force, the firm's team of video game lawyers, advising gaming companies around the world.

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Maarten Goldstein

His favorite games of 2004:

1. Half-Life 2: Best first-person shooter, ever. The way it combines great graphics with a gloomy setting and physics-enabled gameplay is terrific.

2. Burnout 3: Just an incredibly entertaining racing game. No matter how many times I've seen it, it's just satisfying to battle with another car before managing to crash it and see the car deform in slo-mo goodness. It is, however, too bad that Xbox Live implementation wasn't as good as it should've been.

3. Unreal Tournament 2004: The game that Unreal Tournament 2003 should've been...just a ton of game modes and maps, with onslaught easily being my favorite. I don't even play this much, I usually just launch a quick 15-minute bot game since the AI does a very nice job.

4. Doom 3: While I thought the game was unambitious when it comes to gameplay, I still had a good time playing...in part because of its phenomenal graphics, as well as the fact that you get to see various old Doom monsters and weapons return in 3D. For me, it made up for the old-school run-and-gun playing style.

5. Far Cry: I liked that CryTek didn't just depend on great engine technology with this game, as it had plenty of other things to offer. Firefights actually required a bit of strategy, too, as you couldn't just rush into mercenary camps without getting killed very quickly: a nice change from the norm.

His top trend from 2004:

This year, games, first-person shooters in particular, finally started using video-card features that have been available for a few years but went unused until this year's game engines. Far Cry, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2 all raised the bar considerably when it comes to game graphics.

His pet peeves for the year:

Though I'm glad my video card is finally being used properly, I feel bump-mapping was this year's colored lighting. Just because you have it available doesn't mean you should constantly use it. It still makes a lot of things, especially characters, look like plastic. Half-Life 2 was the best in not going overboard, even though the Source engine has all the tech features you could want.

His favorite personal moments in gaming in 2004:

In Half-Life 2...just after Alyx gives you the gravity gun. The way you play with Dog...that was such an unexpected, fun, lighthearted moment for me...until the headcrab pods come crashing down, and you quickly remember the harsh reality of City 17.

His predictions for 2005:

Looking forward to the announcements of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 2 at E3. There's been so much speculation, though I doubt we'll see either in 2005. Game-wise, honestly I'm not really sure. Jade Empire, Brothers in Arms, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, and Battlefield 2 are on my list to watch, but you never really know how a game will turn out.

Maarten Goldstein is editor in chief and co-owner of Shacknews.com.

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Erik Wolpaw

His impressions on taking a break from game reviewing by having spent all of 2004 working as a designer for a Bay Area game studio.

Smart guys and a handful of women working absurdly long hours under a lot of stress, which is pretty much what I expected. Though, like stomach cancer, it's a whole different level of awful when it's actually happening to you. What did surprise me is that San Francisco is filthy, filled with aggressive bums, and smells like piss. It's a real s***hole.

His pet peeve for the year:

I guess I'm most upset about the absence of the word "g***." I had to play six Vietnam War games in as many weeks this year. They all more or less threaten to expose the true horror of the Vietnam experience. Toward that goal, they're enthusiastically lousy with bad behavior: cussing, whoring, murder, drug abuse. Evidently, though, some of the harsh realities of 'Nam are too controversial even for the envelope-pushers who make games about it, because not a single one of them ever employs the word "g***." In the worst of the bunch--a lurid piece of crap called Shellshock: Nam '67--one of the heroes ties a prostitute to a bedspring, tenderizes her face with his enormous fists, and then slices off her [breasts] with a Rambo knife before slitting her throat. Still, nobody's racially insensitive to the brutalized whore, since, you know, that might be offensive.

Some of his favorite games of 2004:

Half-Life 2: In much the same way that I don't want the waitress to tell me her name, I'm not a big fan of games that insist on telling me a story. But Half-Life 2 (like Half-Life before it) integrates a simple, kind of interesting plot into the action without resorting to droning exposition and without ever intruding on the game part of game. And the game part's wicked.

World of Warcraft: Blizzard had the radical idea to design a massively multiplayer role-playing game that was a fun game--rather than a surrogate life or a second job with elves. It worked out great for everybody, but especially me.

GTA: San Andreas: When I was a kid, I was fascinated by a really detailed fake ad in National Lampoon for a ghetto train set. I was too young to realize that it was a joke, so every Christmas I'd beg my parents to buy it for me. Eventually, my dad got drummed out of the legal profession, he went to jail, and we moved to a real ghetto. Time passed, and a bunch of stuff happened, like I got a job selling hot dogs and a chronic illness. Just when my life seemed to be winding down to its painful, embarrassing conclusion, Rockstar actually released the detailed ghetto train set of my childhood dreams. It was a Christmas miracle. The end.

Erik Wolpaw writes reviews for GameSpot and other publications. He says, "My first children's book, 'A Taste Trip to the Zoo' will be published in 2005."