How to make your game not sell:

http://www.holybadman.com/

1. Name it “Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?” No, seriously. That’s the name of this game. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that it basically has absolutely nothing to do with the gameplay itself.

2. Put it on the PSP, which has approximately zero marketshare outside of pirated games and DVD rips.

3. Don’t even bother to sell it in stores, make it only available through download via PSN, which requires 100 steps to activate on your PSP if you even realize it exists in the first place.

4. Make the gameplay really hard to grasp – emergent and mystifying and indirect, and also really punishingly hard.

5. Give it all a retro 8-bit look that has nothing to do with the rest of the game in any way.

I literally have a hard time imagining how you could make this game sell FEWER copies other than not making it in the first place.

Which is all kind of a shame because it’s one of the most original and inventive and addictive games I’ve played in quite a while. Basically you are carving a dungeon maze out underground, and as a result of where you dig you release certain monsters. Those monsters then form an ecology where they redistribute nutrients around and can form a food chain of higher level monsters eating lower level ones. Then heroes invade your dungeon and you have to hope your maze was confusing enough and monsters tough enough to defeat them.

I’m not sure if it has long term legs but it’s incredible compelling to me to just try and figure out the ecology and watch it all play out. One of the better “small” games I’ve played.

Between this, Plants vs Zombies, Magic: Planeswalkers, and Battlefield 1943 it’s been an amazing year for smaller downloadable games.

War on the Southern Front

My copy arrived today and I ran through the tutorial scenario in right around an hour -- 4 turns, would take me much less to replay it I think. Not to fear for the hardcore Grognards though, the Greece and North African campaign seem much larger.

There aren't any major changes in the core HPS engine, but they have made a few improvements overall -- you can see a rough estimate of attack odds before committing to a battle, for example. There are a few hotkey hints now instead of none.

But overall the biggest improvement for me is in the overall game design. It is much higher level than the Panzer Campaigns games -- 10 kilometer hexes, 2 day turns, and the system is accordingly a lot more streamlined. Stacking limits keep you from putting more than a divison in single hex and in general there are way fewer stats to keep track of (though the core AA, AT, attack, effectiveness, etc. are all there). The divison + brigades unit sizes are a bit easier to process as well though they aren't as well visually represented as I'd like.

As someone who just likes a lot of the geography aspect of these games, it's also nicer to play at a scale where you can actually see some recognizable bits.

Anyways, mark me as pleasantly surprised with this one. It's no War in the Pacific, but I'm digging it so far.

I’ve been on a Tower Defense kick after finishing my 3rd playthrough of Plants vs Zombies… so I went and picked up the latest Final Fantasy downloadable game on WiiWare, “Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord”. It is literally a tower defense game, in that you are creating your Tower of Darkness™ to slay hordes of adventurers that try and climb it to destroy the Dark Crystal™.

Despite the sheer goofiness and cloying FF:CC license, there’s a decent little game there. You pick floors of the tower and summon monsters to defend it. There’s a fair bit of strategy, and it’s just fun in that Dungeon Keeper way to build your traps and tear apart adventurers. It’s also cheap, like $10. Starts out a bit slow but really picks up and gets challenging a few levels in. My two little boys LOVE watching me play as well.

The other Final Fantasy tower defense game out there, Crystal Defenders on XBLA, I cannot really recommend to anyone. It’s literally a port of a cellphone game, and it is brutally difficult with an awful interface to boot.

Also this week Little King’s Story came out, and is a Pikmin style light fantasy strategy game. It actually has some engaging characters (though remember my tolerance for cloyingly cute is abnormally high). The gameplay is a neat mix of exploration, expanding your town, and resource allocation among your workers. The European version has been out for a while and has gotten some rave reviews. I’m not super far into it but quite enjoying it so far.

I guess it’s a good week for being an overly cutesy strategic tyrant on the Wii.