Week 2 Bad Game: Kamisama

Ever get the urge to just make something, and don't really know why?

Voices are thanks to our very own Sami Genstein, one of my co-workers at Harmonix.  The babies... aren't mine either.

Raw Flash File can be found here.

- Chris

Week 1 Bad Game: LilyBad

For the first week of the project, I present LilyBad.  Remember those old games where you could sometimes bog the framerate down and teleport through walls / bullets / etc?  This game is entirely about framerate.  You have to, essentially, teleport from lilypad to lilypad on your quest, avoiding the water pits by conveniently never having been there.  

Time taken: 6 hours

Things learned: The first version of this had far more lily pads.  I had hoped this would lead to more player choice and creativity, but it just lead to a noisy screen with a million things on it.  The frog was half the current size too, but nothing seemed as important on the screen as the frog's face.  I also added the "sunk lillypads dot" to remind the player where the pads were supposed to be.  This one little feature changed the game from a rote memorization game to one where the player was trying to be as rhythmic as possible.  I had shrunk the latter lilypads in an earlier version of the game, but it didn't seem to fit the feel of making the player barely successful while in a full-on panic.

The raw flash file can be found here, and a direct link to the full game here.

On a personal note, I'm really excited about this project.  I look forward to the next 50 weeks!

- Chris Canfield

The One Bad Game a Week project

Welcome to my latest idea: One bad game a week.  In this, I'll be developing and posting a new bad creation once a week, every week, for a full year.  That's 52 potentially mind-numbingly bad mini... micro... nano... protogames, all of whom will hopefully be dipping their ugly toes into different aspects of gaming.

Stay tuned for more information and the official kickoff.

EA Sports Active is Kicking My Ass

I just started the "30 day challenge" on EA Sports Active, and I have to say...

EA, We need to talk(tm).

Look, I know you mean well. That everything you do is out of a combination of love, a desire for approval from metacritic, and a burning personal greed. It's OK, I like the greed in you. I think it's one of your cutest traits.

But this "Sports Active" phase is a bit of a mess. Your female announcer? She carves smiles into teddy bears. As a child she used to "disassemble" squirrels to see if she could make them happier, perkier, and able to do more squat thrusts. I didn't want to have to tell you this, but she's bananas, and not in the Gwen-Stefani sort of way. You should give her a starring role in the Arkum Asylum game.

As a modern meterosexual city man, I respect that you've included gay men in the game. It is, after all, a game about workout gyms. But did they *all* have to be gay? I'm watching my character run around the track doing leg lifts, and all I can think is that his carrot cake must be on fire. Really, the only thing straight about your trainers is their lack of rhythm. And in case you thought we wouldn't notice, men and women do have different faces in real life. We don't all happen to look like Olga from Sweden, shouting "Uf Da!" and "Step up the Intensity!" as we pillage small coastal towns with our amazingly toned upper calves.

Somehow, you've managed to come up with a selection of tunes that should grace the world's most high-energy elevators. They're like listening to club music through the walls of the McDonalds next door. When I said just go steal some music, I meant from The Pirate's Bay, not a Casio Keyboard. Honey, your music has no beat, and your trainers have no rhythm. I feel like I'm learning to dance from a Roomba with an electrical short, in an ice skating rink, who keeps beeping at me to "Keep it up!"

And the detection? I could be making love to you with the wii mote and you wouldn't detect it. Yes, I'm doing leg thrusts. Yes my tummy is tucked. I'm sorry, but it's really not me. It's you. You have a problem. You're controlling, but not in a good way. Not in a way that makes me happy, anymore. I mean, at first it was endearing, how you cared enough to stop everything so that we could do it prefectly, together. But I don't have time right now, and I was doing it right. Can't you just let it go, and we'll do a quickie? If you tell me one more time that "You're going to hurt yourself if you don't get it together," I'm going to use this worthless giant rubber band for something you really won't like.

I'm sorry, I was just lashing out at the end there. I'm frustrated, can't you understand? Look, why don't we forget this whole sports active thing for one night. Let's just play the sims game. You used to like that one, right? You can be the spoiled schoolgirl with no friends, and I'll be the malevolent god who removes all the doors from the bathroom. Just like the good old times...