The idea of the segment is to give you the community a chance to have a voice on our show, but in a far more interesting way than just listener mail. We dedicate the last few minutes of certain shows covering a topic that we set out for you. This will normally have some correlation with what we will be discussing on the following week’s show.

There is one simple rule: -
Keep your answers short as long essays are hard to do justice to.

Now how is this going to work? Well, we give you four options: -

• The first is you can leave a voicemail via Skype, name Digitalcowboys
• Leave a comment on our website at www.thedigitalcowboys.com
• Send us an email on mailbag@digitalcowboys.com
• Or lastly, leave a post under the dedicated forum thread

So it’s time to set out the topic for you for this week’s show. We will be covering Achievements this week and the question that I pose to you thus: -

Achievement points and Trophies have changed gaming forever!

Some people love them and some people hate them but tell us what you think and we shall read it out on the show

So there we go you’ve got your assignment for the week and we look forward to hearing your comments and this is open to any followers of the Digital Cowboys, so podcasters, PR Persons but most importantly, the general community.

For those listeners last week who, like me were listening intently to Leon reeling off his list of the best quality Wii titles, here is the breakdown in no particular order. Some of them are standalone discs, some are Wii Ware.

• Mario Kart Wii
• Super Mario Galaxy
• New Mario Bros Wii
• Muramasa: The Demon Blade
• Boom Blox and the follow-up Boom Blox Party
• Legend of Zelda: Twilght Princess
• Metroid Prime Trilogy
• Mad World
• Dead Space Extraction
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl
• Tatsunoku VS. Capcom
• Super Paper Mario
• Zack and Wiki
• Little Kings Story
• Lost Winds and it’s sequel; Winter of the Melodias
• Nyx Quest
• De Blob
• A Boy and His Blob
• World of Goo
• Order Up
• Bonsai Barber
• Bit Trip Beat and Bit Trip Core
• Lit
• Max and the Magic Marker
• Swords and Soldiers
• You, Me and the Cubes
• Tomena Sanner
• Miboshi the Three Shape Arcade
• Tales of Monkey Island

In the next few weeks, Tony and I are planning a 24-hour gaming challenge. Giles from our community has donated to us a code for a 48-Hour Xbox Live trial and for one whole day we will be trying to amass the largest gamerscore that we can on it. Giles has pledged to sponsor us £10 for every 100 gamer points earned.

Now I’m thinking that with a pile of games between us, Tony and I can aim for 5,000 over the 24 hour period, which would mean Giles alone will be donating a hefty £500. What we need is community support here. Pledge either a per-gamerpoint amount like Giles or a lump sum to us, because we need a lot more than what one generous man can give. I know you get charities thrust in your face all the time, but this is something we can all relate to in terms of endeavour and all donations will be going to Doctors without Borders, which will aid in the medical care for the thousands of Haitians injured in the recent earthquake.

MSF (Medicines Sans Frontiers) an independent international medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid in more than 60 countries to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters or exclusion from healthcare. In emergencies and their aftermath, MSF rehabilitates and runs hospitals and clinics, performs surgery, battles epidemics, carries out vaccination campaigns, operates feeding centres for malnourished children and offers mental health care. When needed, MSF also constructs wells, dispenses clean drinking water, and provides shelter materials like blankets and plastic sheeting.

As for the challenge itself; we’ll be up all day and night, constantly swapping controllers and checking to see where the next gamerpoints gan be found. You can help us by sending Alex any terrible games you think it would be funny to see us try to get points from, or send us good ones if you prefer. We will send them back or sell them and donate the proceeds according to your wishes. You can also help us with all the online multiplayer achievements. We’ll be twittering our progress constantly so everyone can get involved and make suggestions on what we could do next.

This is a good thing we can do for other people, lend us your support folks.

Alex

The idea of the segment will be to give you the community a chance to have a voice on our show, but in a far more interesting way than just listener mail. The plan is to dedicate the last few minutes of certain shows covering a topic that we set out for you. This will normally have some correlation with what we will be discussing on the following week’s show.

There is one simple rule: -
Keep your answers short as long essays are hard to do justice to.

Now how is this going to work? Well, we give you four options: -

• The first is you can leave a voicemail via Skype, name Digitalcowboys
• Leave a comment on our website at www.thedigitalcowboys.com
• Send us an email on mailbag@digitalcowboys.com
• Or lastly, leave a post under the dedicated forum thread

So it’s time to set out the topic for you for next week’s show. We will be covering RPGs and the question that I pose to you thus: -

Why has there not been a Final Fantasy 7 remake yet? And if there was, what changes would have to be made to its formula, to fit within the modern day standards?

So there we go you’ve got your assignment for the week and we look forward to hearing your comments and this is open to any followers of the Digital Cowboys, so podcasters, PR Persons but most importantly, the general community.

From YouTube:

Written By: Alex Shaw

I’ve been running over Episode #128 of Digital Cowboys in my head all evening. In that show we talked with James Portnow about what we should re-brand the term game with. Today I watched the new Daniel Floyd video on Video Games and Facing Controversy (Which is excellent as usual), made in conjunction with Portnow, discussing how our industry needs to stop quailing in the face of criticism when we attempt anything controversial even in the pursuit of artistic merit. He stated that we need to drop the term game in the same way as comic books became graphic novels in the 80’s and gained respect with work like Watchmen and Maus.

But as we said in the show, all the new and suggested terms seem unwieldy or pretentious, smacking of desperation to be taken seriously or suggesting some incredible new medium when it’s really just the same games we’ve been playing for years but which have evolved far beyond Pong and Space Invaders. Spielberg’s Interactive Entertainment or “I.E.” springs to mind. Interactive movie is no good either as we immediately think of Metal Gear Solid, sporadic moments of control amid hours of cut scenes and that specific kind of experience, which excludes games like Braid or Grand Theft Auto IV.

So I got to thinking, what is the one thing that games have that stands them apart from all other media? Reading is passive, as is watching films or listening to music, so it’s the interactivity that’s the difference.  I’d suggest we get rid of the modifier and simply call them what they are… an Interactive.

Wait ten seconds before you respond. Think hard. Set your mind thirty years into the future to some Demolition Man future where everybody is relatively content and what we now know as games would seem as primitive as Defender does to you now. Those people, when stepping into the heads of characters created by Hideo Kojima Junior, won’t just be playing games. Whatever you conceive that they will be doing, it’s unarguable that it will be interactive in the way that film, books and music will still not be, unless of course they are cross-branched into Interactives with the evolutions of Heavy Rain and Rock Band. It’s a word in common use today, but used in a new context, it’s one that describes in just four syllables exactly what you’re doing, the variations being entirely thematic.

Now in the real future of 2038, that word is unlikely to be the name for what we now call games, but my point is that it could be. I believe we do need re-branding because one of our biggest barriers to evolution of the medium is an inability to change general public perception of the term game. It is kind of like trying to give yourself a nickname in school, I grant you, but if we don’t think about it and discuss the possibilities then we’ll be living in the pixelated shadow of Pac-Man forever.

Dawn of RTS

It’s fair to say that I’m a long time fan of the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre, I’ve been toying with these games since the early days of PC gaming via Dune II which for many set the standards for RTS. For me I find the games to be like chess, ultimately re-playable as you attempt differing strategies to overcome the same initial setup, particularly when skirmish modes came into play in later years. In particular I find the Dawn of War (DoW) games to be the pinnacle of this game play for me, and I have spent many hours playing the same levels over, even if I win I like to see if I can do it again with differing tactics or faction. It no doubt helps that I used to play the table top Warhammer games with my brother when I was younger, however I also think DoW came along at the time when the RTS was firmly into it’s stride and  brought together all of the features one needed for a game which satisfied the mindset of your average RTS player as completely as possible.

A mouse, a mouse, my kingdom for a mouse!

Now you will have noticed that all these games have been PC based for me. The RTS was born on the PC and for very good reason; You need a mouse to be able to play these games well. They are as much about micromanagement as they are understanding which strategies to employ for any given situation, in fact the major game play requires a simple notion, and that is your units are stupid. By this I mean the units under your control will often just stand there taking fire until they are all dead, our they rout (run away scared in none military speak!), there’s very little idea of running into cover or trying to flank an enemy, after all that is your job, to direct the combat. Add to this the huge number of keys available on a PC keyboard which can be used to group and organise your attack force and you have a quite complex but easy to use system of command.

Controller Woes

Now this is all very well on a PC, where moving a unit out of harm or positioning several teams to out manoeuvre your enemy just requires a few hot key presses and mouse clicks. Bring this to the console world however and what you have is a very clumsy interface no mater how you try to implement it. The fine control and unit groupings that are so easy on the PC become near impossible to make use of, and being the dumb units that they are they’ll just throw themselves onto their swords for little gain. To use a joke levelled at even the best console based RTS, you basically choose between selecting a single unit and ‘Select All Units!’ This somewhat robs the game of any nuances it once had, and returns us to the bad old days when the way you won any map was with a ‘Tank Rush’. This is where you build up as many units as you can and rush them all at the enemy, a tactic which used to work well on earlier titles, but which has become less of a factor in more recent generations.

From the drawing board

What I feel is required is a rethink of how this sort of game should play out on console, that fine control is never going to be available on a standard controller, and any game specific peripheral will just marginalise the genre even more than it already is on the platforms. So what we need is a new way to play, a way where you have less of the micromanagement, and more direct command of the military force entrusted to you.

How does your average RTS start each mission? Well normally by presenting you with your Primary and Secondary objectives, and some bonus ones on occasion. Here is where things need to change. Don’t present me with short sighted single battle objectives, tell me the overall goal of the campaign, then present me with an overview of the entire battle field and allow me to select targets. Effectively you create the missions yourself, deciding whether you want to take out the air defences first, or cut off the supply routes or whatever. Then having laid out your master plan you launch into each mission with the objectives you’ve defined yourself. It’s then up to your troops to just get on with the job. After all these are supposed to be highly trained fighting machines, not just a bunch of guys given guns and then left waiting for command to tell them what to do in every possible situation.

So am I expecting you to sit back and just watch the battle unfold? Not at all. During battle your ground forces are going to need support, from artillery strikes to bombing runs, they can call these in and then it is down to you to authorise the use of additional forces and deep strikes all of which will come out of your campaign ‘budget’. So do you bend to their every whim and then find yourself halfway through the campaign with scant funds to push forward, or hold back in the hope your troops can win out, knowing full well you could be dooming the current mission to failure.

Less strategy more command

Now it could be argued, and I’d probably agree, that this would no longer be an RTS, perhaps a Real Time Command? But it’s still satisfying the needs this genre aims to. You are still commanding a military force, the battlefields will still look and play out the same as if you are directly controlling the guys on the ground. It’s just you’ve been elevated to a higher level of command, overseeing the entire campaign and attempting to outsmart the enemy over the long term. The idea of sacrifice plays a much bigger part here, and a fool-hardy mission in one part of the map might merely be to draw enemy units away from your actual targets. You get away from the idea of success or failure on an individual mission which can become very frustrating and halt your progress in a traditional title.

Collateral Damage

It’s not all positive of course, this more hands off battle play may not be quite what you are after, and it’s much harder to respond to changes in each actual battlefield mission having already committed your forces to the campaign. This also removes one of the corner stones of many RTS titles by not requiring any resource harvesting or indeed base building, however that said that is often one of the particular features singled out for reasons not to play RTS titles, so maybe that works either way.

Future War

All things considered I think I would have a great deal of fun playing a title setup in this manner. You could become a true armchair commander, laying out your plans and then watching on as your trained units take care of the missions you’ve laid out for them. Given some good camera modes there could be some spectacular fire fights, which you could take the time to enjoy, something which most RTS titles don’t give you the chance to due to the continual nagging micromanagement required. It also requires you to be constantly thinking about the bigger picture, thinking one step ahead rather than just worrying about getting through the current mission at any cost. If anything it’s returning the genre more towards the chess game, that opens up the re-playability of a title allowing for as many campaign strategies as you can imagine.

A final note just to thank QuizzicalDemon for talking through some of the points outlined above with me and helping to formulate my plan for Console RTS domination!

This was conducted at PAX 2009 with Chris Foster, the lead designer for Beatles: Rock Band who was kind enough to give us an interview a few days prior to the game’s release.

DC [Alex Shaw]: Since we’re in the UK, peripherals have been an issue for us. From the other side, what are the particular pitfalls and logistics of trying to distribute peripherals for a game like Rock Band or Beatles: Rock Band on a worldwide scale?

CF: Well, the best thing about the Beatles’ game is that we are bringing Beatles instruments with it and those are based on Rock Band 2 hardware. So Europe will finally be getting the upgrade. These are more polished even than the Rock Band 2 instruments, and especially the guitars; for the first time in Europe you now get the auto calibration. You just hold it up to the screen and the speaker, and it automatically calibrates the lag. But the logistics of it overall are that we have to get the game done six times; America and Europe for each of three platforms. That means you have to get one done really early, then localization has to be done for different languages, and then changes have to be made to fit the Wii platform. So you basically just have to start early. And with Rock Band and Rock Band 2, that was okay, but with the Beatles, because it’s the Beatles, because they have such appeal, we made a point of getting it done very early so that we could get the game just right.

DC: Consider Australia. Are they going to be getting Beatles: Rock Band?

CF: I believe they are getting bundles and hardware on September 9^th.

DC: Obviously you’re reaching a completely different demographic with this than with the previous two Rock Band games, and a lot of these people might already own a Playstation 2 – why no PS2 release?

CF: I think because we’re trying to advance the game, and the dreamscapes would really have been a technical challenge. With all the vocal harmonies and all the things happening on screen, that would have been too much of a challenge. Honestly we didn’t want to do the game half-assed. To get the game to fit on the PS2 we would have had to make compromises.

DC: How’s the Wii version holding up?

CF: The Wii version holds up great, and that was a big challenge for us, and a big priority for us. So all the features are in there, all the dreamscapes, and all the art assets look as good, even though it’s at a lower resolution.

DC [Old Cowboy Paul Shotton]: Vocal harmonizing – you have to have three microphones, how does that actually work?

CF: In terms of the connections, it’s fairly simple – you have three USB ports, more if you use a hub, so we wanted to make it that simple for the user; just plug in your microphone and go. We made it so you can sing the way you want to. Everyone can sing karaoke style – sing the same thing – or choose to harmonize. But you don’t have to harmonize to get through the game, it just becomes something you’re rewarded for. The main challenge was finding the best way to represent three parts in the same track without being visually confusing, and having three sets of microphone arrows without being visually confusing. And having rules that aren’t punishing and make you want to learn how to play.

DC: How does that basically work, because I’m thinking if I want to play solo, can I turn off the harmonies?

CF: Absolutely. You can play solo with one line, where up to three people with mikes can sing that one track, but there’s also harmonies mode, where you have each of the three lines pulled out, so you can see what you’re supposed to be singing. And we made each of the arrows visually distinctive. So when you start singing you can follow your part. As you’re playing, if you tap on your microphone, you’ll be able to see which one of those arrows you’re playing.

DC: How do you practice that? What exactly is the vocal practice mode?

CF: We added a vocal practice mode, which is like a vocal trainer but it’s in the section with the practice modes for the other instruments. We upgraded it so that you can practice each section vocally, and cycle through all the parts. It’ll ghost out all the parts but one. It will make a flute noise, a guidance point that will actually superimpose over a single part, so it’ll cause that to lift out.

DC: I think it’s always been hard for me to distinguish the melody and the harmony.

CF: What I found was that the melody you know, the high harmony is sort of audible, but that middle line was always a mystery. It’s nice to finally hear what George was singing.

DC: Is this technology something that you’ll be carrying on with in future games? And even that practice mode would be handy.

CF: Absolutely. It works so much better than we could have expected. We knew the Beatles would support harmony, that’s what their music is about, but it’s been so well received, and we’re not fools in that particular way!

DC [Alex]: I know you won’t be able to tell me anything from Harmonix’s point of view about future titles, but what would you like to see in Rock Band 3?

CF: I’ll tell you what I would like to see in future Rock Band titles, I don’t want to see us resting on our laurels. We have a franchise; we want to nurture it, we don’t want to exploit it. So finding new ways to interact with your music, finding new ways to play with the campaign and challenges, new styles of gameplay – finding ways to do that so that it’s still familiar but not too familiar.

This is most of an impromptu interview we held with Lars Bakken, multiplayer designer for Bungie after play-testing the new Firefight (survival) mode on Halo 3: ODST at PAX. Lars was gracious and generous with his time; a thoroughly nice bloke.

LARS: So you’ve got six skulls that turn on progressively as the game goes further in, and then after three you get a bonus round where we just turn on all the skulls, including Iron (round restarts on death), and we pour grunts in. Pretty much the only way to survive is to go for head shots. It’s a way for you to basically get lives, because I don’t know how much you play, but as you get to the next round we refill the health, we refill the weapons, and it’s like “hey, you made it, go on to the next round”.

DC: Is there a limit to how many waves there’s going to be?

LARS: No, it never ends. It’s just as long as you can survive. I mean it does get to a point where all the skulls turn on, and it’s very hard.

DC: We had infinite lives when we played, but with only seven lives between four people, how long would a game last for the average player?

LARS: It’s hard to say, people of different skill levels will last different lengths of time. In the studio, we can go for like an hour and a half, two hours sometimes, but when the game comes out, we really don’t know how long people are going to last.

DC: How long is the single player campaign going to take?

LARS: There are so many different variables, the game is actually laid out pretty differently now, you’ve got this big city at night, you’re playing the flashback levels in a different sequence. It’s an open world map, you can go round and find these cool objects and when you do you can play the flashback level, and then you get more of the story. Because of that there’s other things going on in the city that we haven’t really talked about, so for people who are really into Bungie games, and the lore, there’s a lot of really cool stuff in there for them to look around and find, so they may spend hours and hours, but there are going to be people who want to go straight through to each thing, and just finish the game. And I would say playing the campaign is on a par with the original Halo 3, so the amount of time you put into that, it’s about the same.

DC: How does that interact with the story, because you’re meant to be a lone soldier, aren’t you?

LARS: Well you’re not in the city at night when you’re playing co-op, you have three other ODST buddies with you, and when you do a flashback, player one is always going to be the guy in the flashbacks, if it’s Dutch, or Mickey, or Buck, and then once again have the three ODSTs with him.

———————————————————————————————

Halo 3: ODST is released on Tuesday and here is my comprehensive list of predictions for some things that will happen in the game.

• About halfway through, the flood will turn up.

That is all.