“At the 2007 Montreal Games Summit, Flagship Studios director of technology Tyler Thompson discussed how using data-driven algorithms instead of “hard-coding” can offer developers more flexibility and control, with lessons from his experience with the Diablo games and his studio’s recent Hellgate: London.”

Thompson mentioned, late in the talk, that quality assurance is much harder when using random generation in your games. Which is noteworthy, because from most accounts Hellgate: London was an buggy mess at launch. Clearly it is a heck of a problem.

This was the final session of MIGS but one – straight afterwards there was the Journalists Panel, where the collected game developers that visited MIGS (well, those that hadn’t already headed off to the pub) could grill a panel of journalists on whatever took their fancy. The panel included Game Girl Advance‘s Jane Pinckard, Sun Media’s Steve Tilley and… me! If I find some free time I’m going to write about the panel, as a lot of arguments were started but never exactly resolved. Not that I’ll be able to resolve them exactly, but there are a few things I still want to make my opinion clear on!

“It’s funny that we mentioned The Rocky Horror Picture Show in our introduction last week, because it’s showing tonight at 11:30 p.m. at the Bloor. It’s been a while, in our memory, since the last time it showed, which would imply that the fans in Toronto aren’t as rabid as elsewhere, but we’d still recommend that you don’t head along unless you’re very familiar with the film. Who knows what could happen.”

I like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but I find it very depressing that of the most important “midnight movies” (El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Eraserhead, as discussed in Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream) only The Rocky Horror Picture Show still maintains a cult cinema following in most cities.

I did see Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain in the cinema a while back, though. It was totally worth it.

“At the Montreal International Game Summit 2007, EA Mobile Montreal’s General Manager, Patrick Minotti, gave his insight into the mobile games industry from the standpoint of a developer who has been in the mobile games industry since 2001, taking a look at the changing face of the mobile game consumer and the changes in how they consume mobile games.”

More from MIGS, except this one is posted on Games On Deck!

It’s been ages since I last mentioned Games On Deck, but for those of you keeping score, here’s a list of every article I’ve written since then.

Interviews with:
Greg Ballard, Glu Mobile; Leighton Webb, I-play; Billy Pamier, Airborne Entertainment; David Gosen, I-play; Stan Liu, Walt Disney Internet Group; John Criswick and Nicholas Reichenbach, Magmic Games; John Lee, Hudson Entertainment; Tony Pearce, Player X; Christopher Payne-Taylor, AdME; Travis Boatman, EA; Ravi Shankar Bose, Fugumobile; Alex Goatcher, Mikoishi; Arthur Goikhman, Cellufun; Pascal Bestebroer, Orange Pixel; Q&A: Callie Johnson, Micazook; Steve Gleitsmann, Emdigo; Damir Slogar, Big Blue Bubble; Peter Ahnegård, Sony Ericsson Developer World; James Kaye, Hands-On Mobile and Julian Corbett, Vollee.

“In his keynote lecture at the 2007 Montreal Games Summit, veteran developer David Perry decided to share what he learned in his 12 months “off” — in which he directed six MMOs, consulted, took classes and started an investment company — about the free-to-play business model, lessons from Asia, and useful time investments for game developers.”

I’m not fully convinced by the free-to-play model, but I think that’s more on a personal level, because I hate purchasing in-game items. My experience of purchasing in-game items come from Second Life, of course, and there are still thousands of people who play that and sustain an economy by purchasing items and services with real money in game, so it’s not that I don’t think it can work. I’m just not entirely sure it’s going to be the end of traditional games, exactly.

I’m very intrigued by a Korean MMO FPS which he mentioned very briefly that didn’t make it into this article – Huxley, from Webzen. Doesn’t look like it’s going to be free to play (it’s coming out for Xbox 360 as well as PC, apparently) but is a good example of the kind of craziness the rest of the world is getting up do in games development. And the name is inspired by Aldous Huxley! Excellent.

“At the 2007 Montreal Games Summit, veteran game writer Susan O’Connor, whose most recent projects include Gears of War, BioShock and Blacksite: Area 51, used comparisons between God of War and the movie Gladiator to illustrate a fascinating lecture on game story.”

I thought this was a good talk on using traditional story writing techniques for video games. For all of the brouhaha that surrounds the new ways that video games could tell stories, O’Connor is astute in pointing out that (for the most part) video game creators need to learn how to write stories in the first place to make them worth telling.

“At the 2007 Montreal Games Summit, Retro Studios president and CEO Michael Kelbaugh discussed the Metroid Prime arc of the classic Nintendo franchise, highlighting challenges faced by the team from the series’ 3D debut to incorporating Wii functionality with Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.”

I’m at the Montreal International Game Summit again! This time I decided to take the bus, which was completely unbearable. I have no idea how my better half managed to take a 21 day trip across the states in a Greyhound bus without going completely and utterly insane. I was only on the bus for about six hours, but by hour two (where we’d just about reached the outskirts of Toronto) I was going bananas.

Anyway, I really like MIGS. There are some really great talks, and this was just one of them today.

(As with my coverage of the Future Play conference, this article, and those that are to follow, are constructed from my notes and edited for publication by the staff at Gamasutra.)

“If you’d feel better playing gun games with a controller that’s more like a gun (as some players like to play golf games with a controller that’s ‘more like a golf club’, though we still think they’re mental) Link’s Crossbow Training is a nice little extra but, whatever you do, don’t pick up a Zapper just for the game – but with Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, House of the Dead II & III, and Ghost Squad just around the corner, there are a few good reasons to pick it up anyway.”

A judgment on the Wii Zapper and Link’s Crossbow Training as a bundle. I quite like the Wii Zapper, stupid bit of plastic that it is, as it does just feel more like shooting a gun than using the Wii Remote on its own. Link’s Crossbow Training is a waste of a pack-in, though. I’d rather they’d just knocked $5 off the price.

Nintendo could get up off their arse and release Duck Hunt for the Virtual Console now, I think. I’m well aware it would require some pretty major new code to get it to work with the Wii Remote, but frankly, a brief glimpse of the ducks in Wii Play Shooting Range just isn’t good enough.

“It’s a strange complaint to begin a review with, but why oh why do character creators never include an option for sideburns? Mass Effect has the most fully featured face creation tool we’ve seen since the Xbox 360′s last (western) RPG of note, Oblivion, but as usual you’re stuck with a limited range of base components. As a result, if you’re like me and like to spend hours trying to create a digital representation of yourself in any game which offers you the opportunity, you’ll still end up with something that could only charitably be claimed to look anything like you through half closed eyes full of Vaseline. It’s still better than the blandly handsome “John Shepard” that the game offers as the base starting character.

The character creation tool works as a neat microcosm of my experience of Mass Effect: it doesn’t live up to its promise, yet somehow it seems worth the effort anyway.”

Mass Effect is a strange title. It’s incredibly flawed – so flawed, in fact, that there are ton of issues that I didn’t have space in this (largely critical) review for – and yet I still want to keep playing it.

If I were to speculate on what the reason for the title’s problems are, I would imagine it would be a case of being a title that was bug tested far more than it was play tested. Any (half decent) play tester should have picked up on things like the inventory system being an absolute abomination, amongst others, and the game would be a lot better for it. I wouldn’t say this was a flawed gem, but it is a sort-of nice rock, or something?

“Hitman stars Timothy Olyphant as an assassin with no parents—and a bald head, so sucks to be that guy. We suppose he’s got all these mad combat skills to make up for it, but who wants to be a baldy orphan? Not us. We’ve got a lot of interest in video game adaptations, usually, but as this one was directed by Xavier Gens we haven’t held out much hope it would be much more than very pretty and utterly forgettable (Frontières, his Midnight Madness entry, must have had a script that was little more than a checklist of horror movie tropes.)”

I’ve yet to play a Hitman game. I’ve wanted to for ages (I like that kind of game) I’ve just never had one in my “to play” pile of games. I’ll get around to them, though.

“Located in the temperate Niagara region best known internationally for wine production, St. Catharines is also home to game developer Silicon Knights, currently working on Too Human for release on Xbox 360 under the command of founder and president Denis Dyack.

Despite its significance, few even within the city are aware that St. Catharines features Ontario’s largest game developer. After all, the number of staff members of Silicon Knights — 160 — pales in comparison to nearby province Quebec’s largest, Ubisoft, which has over 10 times as many.”

I didn’t realise people made such a big deal about everything Denis Dyack says! What I thought were fairly inoffensive (and frankly, rather logical) comments on the subsidies for game developers in Quebec have been linked on Game|Life, GamesIndustry.biz/Eurogamer, and more.