Words confuse me.

After a couple of recent updates I've decided I'm going to have to add some common games industry words to the custom dictionary for Google toolbar's spellchecker. Not too long ago I remember a discussion on the Chaos Engine about the correct hyphenation for these terms (and if they should be hyphenated at all), and being a bit lazy I thought I could get an update out of it, instead of just looking at that (and besides, I seem to remember no solid answers being arrived at).

Anyway, I'm currently thinking the following:

• Gameplay, not game-play or game play because they both look funny (hey I'm not saying this is a scientific study).
• Cut-scene instead of cutscene. Though I'm not too sure about this one, both look kind of right to me.
• Mini-game. If I'm remembering my English language teacher correctly, this is right because the 'mini' is a prefix.

Is there any kind of industry standard for these? It's one of those things that you sometimes stumble across quite by accident that make you realise just how young the industry is, and how much more we have to do.

Supermodels on my D(s).

In a strange turn of events, I've recently been playing a few new DS games. I say 'strange' because, unlike apparently the entire rest of the world, I've had a very small DS software collection until about two weeks ago.

I only bought one for Advance Wars, you see, and picked up a couple of other interesting-looking titles along with it - Phoenix Wright (the first one), and Trauma Centre, both of which left me a bit cold if I'm being honest. Phoenix Wright because even in the tutorial I found it annoyingly linear, and Trauma Centre demanded too much skill from me in too short an amount of time. And not much else in the DS's library has appealed to me since then (except for Hotel Dusk a few months back).

But in the last month I've bought three new DS games, effectively doubling my collection. I shall list them now, for your reading pleasure.

Theme Park, which is a port of the old game Theme Park (remarkable, I know, but I'm sure that no matter how much intelligence I hope my readership has, someone won't have realised). The interface has been nicely ported, apart from one thing - to select things in some menus you have to draw ticks or circles. Why do people keep doing this? Just because it's a DS game it doesn't mean you have to shoe-horn in some retarded gesture system to make it worthwhile - the two screens and touch screen are fine enhancements to the interface all by themselves. I swear, some day someone will release a game where you select options on the main menu by blowing on the microphone.

Slitherlink came highly recommended by Eurogamer. If, like me, you have a sordid past filled with easy addiction to grid-and-numbers puzzles like soduko, minesweeper, and picross, this will be an entirely new form of electronic heroin. There's not a lot more to be said about it really. The menus are utterly incomprehensible to me, but by experimenting before I'd invested too much time into my save game I managed to work out what most of the buttons do.

Puzzle Quest was a game I'd heard mentioned all over the place on the internet - it seems to be one of those occasional titles that gets picked up on as something of a darling to the hardcore gamer wannabe elite. Except this turned out to be very good, and not something deeply average but arty looking. There's a PC demo kicking around somewhere and after a quick play I knew I'd have to buy it. It's a fairly basic fantasy RPG but instead of a tiresome turn-and-stats based combat system you play a Bejewelled clone against the monsters. Its design genius also extends to you not losing any progress if you lose a fight, and in fact you keep the gold and experience gained during that scrap, so you're still progressing, even when you fail.

So there you have it - a brief round-up of some DS games I've been playing. This isn't just an Xbox fansite after all, see?

Blow me.

I was idly flicking through MCV the other day (it makes great toilet reading at work, since technically you're doing industry research and not wasting time, and also if you piss yourself laughing at the letters indie retailers write in every week then at least you're in the right place), and I stumbled across an advert for Logitech's new PS3 controller - the ChillStream. Its USP seems to be that it has tiny holes in the grips, allowing your brutishly large simian gamer hands to receive a constant flow of cooling air.

Such an awesome idea targetted at sweaty-fisted gamers hunched over in poorly ventillated rooms had to have been done before, I thought, and after a bit of digging around I found that Nyko released a very similar PC controller ages ago.

Though I suspect B. A. Provan "gameman" might be a Nyko employee. Who else could claim that blowing air on your hands was a technology that had "changed the face of console gaming"? I also liked his suggestion that it was sweaty hands that previously stopped you from playing games for "as long as you want", and not things like hunger, or toilet breaks.

Quite a toilet-centric update this. Sorry, mum!

Make a note in your diaries.

What? No! They've got to be kidding. They can't release three great and involving games on the same day. What the hell are they playing at?

Seriously though - either Play's telling porkies and these aren't all coming out on June 1st, or someone somewhere needs kicking in the head for scheduling three sure-to-be-great games against each other. One way or another there's something rotten here.

Set-piece action.

In a break from my usual pop-culture entertainment choices of TV, movies, and video games, I recently went to see a musical.

While I was sat there in the dark, trying to hear what the actors were saying over the rustling of sweet wrappers (I'm sure someone behind me had bought a packet of pass the parcel sweets, since they took ages unwrapping them, and also helpfully waited until after the loud musical numbers had finished and the quieter dialogue sections were going on before stuffing their inconsiderate faces. But anywhere, where was I? ... ) I got to thinking about whether a game structured as a play could work.

And by that I'm not talking story, I'm thinking of set and gameplay.

Set-wise it's pretty interesting. The stage had a basic structure that all of the sets had to fit in to (fairly obviously, I mean, if they went outside for a scene it's not like the audience could go with them), with chunks that slot in to the various places around the edge, and furniture that fills in the space in the middle. The sets tend to be slightly abstract and stylised as well - larger block shapes and a lack of fine details.

The up side of this construction is that all of the locations the script contains fit into one space, and that there is a fair amount of set re-use (both in terms of the same location revisited, and also in terms of some sets being mainly composites of other sets' bits and pieces). The down side is that the sets don't stand up to the kind of prolonged close scrutiny you're able to give most game locations, and also that scripts are limited in the number of locations they can use.

In a play the audience's attention is drawn away from that first negative point by clever use of lighting and pace, which focus your eyes more on the characters. Lighting systems are pretty good in modern engines though, so I'm sure that with proper set direction this aspect would be transferable, and with fewer polys used on the sets, very high quality character models could be used. The pacing is slightly more difficult though.

The main problem I've had while thinking through this idea is - how would the gameplay work? What do you actually do in the game? The obvious answer would be some sort of point-and-click adventure game, but I think the simplicity and restricted nature of the sets might interfere with that - plus each character's location on stage doesn't happen by accident, they're where they are because it works best visually and for the story. Allowing a player free reign to wander around would no longer ensure the best lighting for them, and would spoil the illusion of the set.

Adventure games are famed for their inventories too, which would require a large number of props on the sets, which may not be best for their simple nature (though it could work nicely in gameplay terms since interactive elements would stand out more - no more trawling the mouse around the screen to find an item only a few pixels big).

The dialogue in adventure games tends to be choice-heavy too, usually halting completely as the player gets to choice their next response, which would completely ruin the pacing of scenes. A few games have gotten around this (I think Mass Effect is going to have a go too) by giving the player a limited time to respond, tightening up the pacing of conversations and making it more interesting.

So overall, I'm still not sure if it could be made to work. But I think it would be interesting. It might even be art! Imagine!

Just Cause (360)

You know, I've been playing it for hours now (according to the in-game tally, well over 24), and I still can't work out if I actually enjoy Just Cause or not. I can't even work out if I think it's a good game or not. I'm just totally divided on it.

On one hand, it's very pretty. The foliage has a nice feeling of density about it, even more-so than Far Cry, and the water and clouds and sun are all lovely - you'll see some incredible sunsets during your playing time, and it'll make you long for a nice sunny beach holiday.

The game's main gameplay hook - the stunts - are also pretty well done, for the most part. Once you get the grappling hook (early on in the story) they get even better, but even from the off you have a lovely set of options when it comes to getting in and out of vehicles, and making your way around the game world. Stealing an aircraft, flying above the clouds, then free-falling for what could be a couple of minutes, before popping open your parachute and guiding yourself gently down to the next mission trigger, is a fantastic James Bond feeling.

The map is huge, but really generic. I understand this is probably largely to do with the setting. In order to make it feel like a tropical archipelago (spelt right first time, go me!) it needs a lot of forest and mountain, and not so much man-made stuff. But it just feels featureless. Every now and then you'll stumble on a nice bit - a destroyed bridge, a large city, a monument, a power plant - but they're so far apart you'll be hard pushed to find them again. And the missions don't make full use of all f the space they're given either, often reusing the same stretches and areas. If the map had been a quarter of the size it would have had more diversity without losing anything.

The real problem with the game is that the mission content is so bland and has a real 'half finished' feel to it. Unless I'm missing something some of the side missions are impossible to complete - I'm told to "Destroy the silo", but the silo has no collision and I can't seem to damage it at all.

The story missions are equally boring for the most part, and are totally devoid of any little details that might make you think effort has been poured in to them. Except for the finale, that is - the last three missions are really nice, and you end up using your stunts as a way to complete them, rather than just as a way of getting around the island, as you tend to in other missions.

I could go on, and originally I was going to. The list of charmless and half-arsed bits in Just Cause is as long as a field: the achievement for completing the 7th mission happens when you have 8 story missions on your in-game stats; the cut-scenes look terrible, and feature generic characters; the vehicle handling feels very off; helicopters aren't any fun; enemy tanks can fire at you quickly enough that although their weapon isn't one shot kill, your guy's recoil animation stops you from being able to escape the fatal second hit; the police are ineffectual outside of missions.

But it does have a kind of charm all of its own. Apparently a sequel is under development - I hope that now the tech is working they focus their efforts much more on the scripted content, and really polish that until it shines. And please, do all of your cut-scenes in-engine, with higher poly characters (since not many people feature in them).

To deal, or not to deal.

I was reading a forum post yesterday about casual games, and complexity. Basically, should casual games be simple? I'd say a simple interface is desirable (possibly even essential, off the top of my head I can't think of a 'casual game' success that's had a complicated interface), but the game itself should be quite deep (or at least offer the depth to players who want it).

A evidence that the casual gaming audience isn't put off by complexity, I offer quiz shows on TV. There are some shows with quite a convoluted set of rules, that still manage to be popular (enough that comedians are writing sketches about them).

Then it hit me - with the rise in interactive services, TV on demand, and IPTV, it would be possible for production companies to record ten minute "tutorial" programmes for quiz shows. A brief run through each round, telling you the rules and what the hell is going on, that you can watch before you waste half an hour with a confused look on your face. At the very least it might me understand what the hell is going on in Deal or No Deal.