I’m appalled that it took me this long to post this, but:

These fellas are Zazen Boys, and they are great. I can’t believe it took me this long to post it; I was planning on doing it two weeks ago, but just kept forgetting.

Hopefully I’ll post something of a bit more worth in the near future, but sadly, my workplace is on complete lockdown, since profits have fallen 30% in the past two months due to the economic crisis. If we aren’t making more money on Friday than we were on Monday, layoffs, yo. It’s so bad that the boss decided that it’s “casual week” because, hey, if people are going to be working 16 hour days to fix this nightmare, they might as well be comfortable.

Last night I headed to the GAMMA 3D party, hosted by Kokoromi as a sort of afterparty for the Montreal International Game Summit. Loud music, video games, 3D glasses, overpriced beer– what’s not to like? I ran into Matthew of The Quixotic Engineer and we hung out and checked out the games. While I barely got any playtime (I was more into just watching– a line of people watching me is too much pressure!), I still got some good views of the crazy games on display, and met a few new people to boot!

AltiToad - Tim Winsky and Johanna Arcand

I didn’t spend much time looking at AltiToad, as it didn’t immediately grab me when watching it, and I had to leave before i got a good chance to really give it time. However, it looked pretty neat form the small amount I saw. You play as a frog in a top-down perspective and must jump from platform to platform, hopping sometimes on clouds (I didn’t see what this does– I think there is a collecion mechanic). I’ll save my report on this game until I can actually play it when they release the games for download. Finding anything about this game or the folks who made it was difficult, too– guys, you’re on the international stage now! Don’t make me Google your names to find links! ;)

BlottoBrace - Antony Blackett, Corie Geerders, and James Everett

This is the first game I settled down and started watching, although I didn’t get a crack at it (most of the games, actually, I preferred to just watch, and never actually played). From what I could tell, you manipulate a paintbrush falling into an abyss, and draw gestures made of paint to combat evil unfilled boxes that are flying at you due to your endless tumble into the abyss. As much as that sounds like i’m making fun, I’m really not; this game looked like a lot of fun. However, most people playing it were doing pretty miserably. I don’t know if this was due to the amount of beer being consumed, or if the controls were a little twitchy, or if they were just hard to get used to (sometimes people would lose, and the game would say “GAME OVER” with “DON’T PANIC!” superimposed– I suppose the game wants less extreme attacks on the analog stick?)

The Depths To Which I Sink - Jim McGinley

Ahh, Sink. This was probably my favourite submission to watch at the entire game. Everything about this game really screamed at me, and if you can get ahold of a pair of 3D glasses and a wired Xbox controller you ABSOLUTELY must check this game out. You control a purple dot that moves in three dimensions and leaves a beautiful purple-fading-to-white tail. Your objective is to crash into things that look like windows, and avoid things that don’t look like windows. I can’t really do it justice; you need to download it and play it. A wonderful little game experience, especially when something changes, the game simply says “Rise” and the tail on your purple dot gets incredibly long, and essentially allows you to start making three-dimensional brush strokes. It’s better than real life and I LOVE it.

Fireflies - Lee Byron and Joannie Wu

This is the only game I managed to play, because the line strangely dissipated just as I walked over to watch it for a second time. Your objective is, ostensibly, to use a jar to capture fireflies while walking around in a dark, tree-filled field. The art, particularly the background tree silhouettes, are incredibly cool-looking; the game controls very weirdly, though, like a twitchy Katamari with the triggers needing to be held to keep the jar closed. I hope to play it a bit more, but this game was especially fun to watch someone good play; the controls just weren’t meshing with my blobby fingers.

Paper Moon - Infinite Ammo with Adam Saltsman

Paper Moon looked fabulous. The art reminded me of a friendlier Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, and the gameplay appeared to be a puzzly 2.5D platformer that summoned memories of Braid, recent DS Castlevania games and . The 3D glasses were vital: being able to see whether or not a platform you were about to jump on was far enough out to actually stand on put a nice wrinkle into the platform-y goodness, and having blocks violently jut out at you added a weird spookiness. I can’t imagine this game was originally made for this contest, though; it seemed far too polished to have been made in the small amount of time since it began. If it was done in that amount of time, well, my faith in the ability of a small, agile game dev team has increased tenfold. Stunning, stunning work.

super HYPERCUBE - Kokoromi/Polytron

The piece de resistance of the whole night, Hypercube was playing front and centre. The concept is simple: you get a complex cube-built behemoth, and a wall with a hole in it. You need to find a way to rotate the cube to enter the hole. Aside from the crazy 3d effects, one thing stuck out above all else: the integration of text-based information. There are multipliers in this game, but the words are floating in the game world instead of being displayed in a hud. Similarly, the number of blocks in your current objective is displayed in the background, near the wall you’re attempting to put it through. I only wish that they had done this with ALL of the information on screen instead of only those two things; the time remaining and current score were static in the top right and left corners, respectively. The whole thing reminded me of the kind of stuff that’d be in an Underworld or Mouse on Mars music video, which is a very good thing.

There was also some Virtual Boy stuff going on. I didn’t see what was happening there, but I’d love to hear, if anyone out there knows.

I can’t wait until the next GAMMA event! Hopefully CIKRO has their crap together by then to put a submission in!

Before I begin, I’d just like to applaud the gaming blogosphere for their hard work in fixing the gamer’s taxonomy; Mitch Krpata famously knocked it out of a park almost a year ago when he examined the “hardcore” and “casual” descriptors on games. Douglas Wilson took a crack at the term “gamer,” challenging its use and its validity. Countless bloggers have questioned the definition of art, and how it relates to games. I can’t remember now, but some have even questioned the term “video game,” as this form of media doesn’t require video (like AudiOdyssey) or, err, games, really (Anthony Burch takes the piss out of a piece of Interactive Entertainment for calling itself a game, but if we don’t call it a video game, what do we call it?). Certainly, the entire industry and community is filled with terms that may have meant something once, but have since become obsolete or have fallen into misuse. While nobody has really adopted these terms, yet, it’s good food for thought; knowing the value of what we’re saying is integral for successful communication. For example, while I might still say “hardcore” or “casual” gamer, I am now fully aware of their limitations.

I’d like to nominate the next word for close scrutiny: retro.

Now, this isn’t an entirely useless word, when it comes to games; games that are from a certain time are retro, simply because they are no longer contemporary but back in style. It’s cool to have images of 8-bit sprites on your website, or Atari logos on your T-shirts. For younger generations, the simple act of playing vintage games could be considered “retro” (for those of us old enough to have played it the first time around, though, it’s really just “nostalgia” or, in some cases, “preference”). New games, though, don’t deserve the term. They are new games, with new ideas, and to essentially call them old is a disservice.

The worst way in which this happens has to be with games that operate on a two-dimensional plane, or with sprites instead of polygons. Braid is a wonderful example of a game that’s been called “retro” that entirely doesn’t deserve the moniker. To the credit of most literate game fans, I haven’t seen this game get called retro much, but I have seen it. What you have here is a wildly imaginative video game that does a pretty good job of transcending its genre with mind-bending puzzles, beautiful watercolor art assets and a clever (if a bit tacked-on) speed run leaderboard. Sure, it passes reference to retro games, but if anything, that’s just proof that it isn’t retro itself; how many old-school games that you can think of are making ironic postmodern references to their predecessors (as nauseating at that sounds)? I can’t think of any.

Another example that’s come up recently (for the third time, I guess) is Ikaruga. That’s a game that brings a lot of new stuff to the table: a vertical shooter that brings incredible 3D graphics that aren’t gaudy or inscrutable; a completely new “polarity” system that makes enemy bullets as beneficial as they are dangerous; and a bizarro plot, the likes of which I’ve never seen in another vertical shooter (or any other… err, media, for that matter). I just spilled the beans on why people call it retro, though; vertical shooter. Since it’s a genre steeped in tradition that dates back to arcades (make a game hard and give it zillions of points so people will feed it quarters and try to beat each other), it must be retro. This simply isn’t true. If that were the case, we’d call Chris Farley’s comedy “retro comedy” because he was just doing mild permutations on Three Stooges physical comedy. We’d call Quentin Tarantino movies “retro cinema” because they’re so heavily informed by Westerns and kung fu flicks and the nouvelle vague and whatever else he claims he loves. The thing is, we just don’t do this. We call the Three Stooges retro, we call Spaghetti Westerns retro, but we don’t call current things that are influenced by them retro. Why are we doing it for games? See also the incredible early 2008 Xbox Live Arcade game, n+, or the upcoming (and Montreal local!) Fez: they’re certainly retro-inspired, but to call them retro is incorrect, and invalidates the new, exciting innovations they bring to games today.

It gets more dicey as we get closer to things that actually are “retro.” Three recent games made me start thinking about the word retro, and really are the core of my argument: Pac-Man Championship Edition, Galaga Legions, and Space Invaders Extreme. Upon first glance, the retro moniker might make a bit of sense; after all, they’re using what are essentially the original sprites in gameplay that very heavily informed by the games upon which they are based. However, Pac-Man C.E. is, when you get right to its guts, as far as possible from Pac-Man as you can get; gone are the days of pattern memorization. This game starts slow, but by the end of its five-minute runtime (a new feature), it’s become a twitchy stressfest joy explosion. Similarly, Galaga Legions only looks like Galaga, and even then, only slightly; its use of remote satellites as the crux of its gameplay is entirely new. Also new: trapping bugs to make them fight for you. They’ve also downplayed pattern recognition in favour of an assault on the senses, rewarding twitch and improvisation in addition to committing levels to mind. Space Invaders Extreme takes one of the most simple games ever made and turns it into a maximalist circus that plays like a Basement Jaxx record sounds– it takes the monotonous pacing of the original game and flips it on its ass.

The point is, all of these games have retro-informed art assets, but they’re all new games—whether they’re new like Chris Farley and Quentin Tarantino are “new” or not, they shouldn’t be called “retro games.” Save that term for Galaxian and Pitfall and Duck Hunt. What most of these games have in common is that they reject a three-dimensional playfield, which is something that’ll never go out of style (until we have a true three-dimensional game display). A two-dimensional game plays to the dimensions that your television set can actually display; it doesn’t attempt to feign a third dimension with polygons and lighting effects and bloom and blur. Personally, I need to temper my 3D game-playing with doses of 2D games, simply because I get tired of parsing foreground from background. There’s no nostalgia in it; I just don’t appreciate the added challenge of imagining depth where there is none, all of the time. It pains me when people essentially call a game old because it doesn’t have that one feature that’s in most “cutting edge” games. Is a game retro if it doesn’t have online play? That’s in most current games. What if it doesn’t have branching narratives? Space Marines? Gamer points or trophies? Simply rejecting a recent development in games doesn’t automatically age or depreciate your game. So please consider this when you call something “retro,” and stop diluting the meaning of a word that means something that is outdated but has returned to “the norm.”

Love Is All is one of the many reasons I’m in love with Sweden. Until today, I had only heard their first record, Nine Times That Same Song, which ended up being one of my favourite records of 2005. I recently heard their new album, A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night, which I didn’t even know was coming out until yesterday; while it’s reviewing lukewarm (but who listens to Rolling Stone, anyway?), I am really, really digging it.

What’s even better: their Youtube channel is filled with videos of them doing dorky lipsyncs to all their new songs– in their Hallowe’en costumes. This is precisely as magical as it sounds. One of the examples is below; if you like it, check out their albums. You will not be disappointed.

Since my blog is new, and is named after me, I thought I would take this chance to both introduce myself and revel in the apparent narcissism that comes with buying a domain name with your name IN it. Here are ten fun, random facts about me!

FACT ONE.

While I talk a lot about Montreal, I didn’t actually grow up here. I was born in Strathroy, Ontario in 1984, and lived near there for two years. My dad is a Presbyterian minister, so we lived in a church manse. While I lived there, I was dive-bombed in my crib by a bat. This house was old. Since I was twelve months old, and had not heard of bats, I thought it was a giant fly. I would continue to be scared of flies and other flying insects until I was about twelve YEARS old. We moved from Strathroy to grand valley for 4 years, where the river would flood our poorly built home annually. Once, a thick fog enveloped our town and I got lost. My parents searched for me through the soupy mist like the victims of a Lovecraftian short story, only to find me eating soil near a chemical dump. At age 6, we moved to Tiverton, on Lake Huron. We lived there until I was 13. Then we moved to Ottawa. When I graduated high school, I wasted a few years of my life, then got work in Montreal testing video games. Now I am a marketing manager for a small online gaming company. I suppose that was more than one fun fact; I should pace myself.

FACT TWO.

As a Canadian with barely any experience being in the USA, there are a lot of normal American things I have yet to experience. Some day, and by some day, I mean within the next 3 years, I intend to drive route 66. At some point, when apparently drunk, I wrote myself this mysterious note on my phone. This is it in its entirety:

THINGS TO LEARN IN USA
Ihop
Sizzler
Bumber shoot

FACT THREE.

My daily commute, from St. Urbain and Rachel to Hymus and Des Sources, clocks in at a staggering combined 2.5 hours. My coworkers ask me, why haven’t you bought a car? Well, they don’t pay me nearly enough. Why haven’t I moved out to the industrial park cum suburb of Pointe Claire? Well, I’m not ready to want to die every day of my life yet. The commute sucks, but my life of living a kilometre from downtown Montreal and working for a job where I can relax and check my websites whenever is worth it until I get into school. In fact, I wrote most of this blog entry on my cell phone while riding the metro, for an absolute lack of better things to do. It destroyed my wrist.

FACT FOUR.

Part of my master plan moving to Montreal was to gain residency and go to school here. I am going to get a BCom at John Molson School of Business in entrepreneurship, and get investors to invest in an indie game dev. Then I will create an empire. School will cost me under 4 large a year because Quebec is awesome. Speaking of awesome, my apartment, which I share with3 other dudes, is 1104 Canadian a month. I pay 287 a month for the master bedroom. It is massive and I love it even though there’s a streetlight that shines right into my degrading, massive front window and ruins my sleep.

FACT FIVE.

My first game console was an Atari 2600. I had Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, and Ms. Pac-Man. We had this because it was super cheap and my family couldn’t afford nice things like the already aging NES. I had no other console until I was 12, when I got a used snes, which my mom had to buy from her boss who was getting rid of it to give her kids an N64. I think I got a better deal than her whiny’ spoiled shit-brats did. My first rpg was chrono trigger, which I bought while on vacation in upstate NY for $20. When I was 13, I took a flyer route and earned 20 a week for 5 hours work. I saved all my money and got a ps1. I later got a ps2 and an xbox 360, but that’s boring stuff because those jobs paid minimum wage and I wasn’t 13.

FACT SIX.

It is entirely possible that, given the chance, I would eat nothing but avocados and tabouli until I turned green and died.

FACT SEVEN.

I went with untreated ADD until I was about 20 years old. I almost flunked out of high school and could barely even do things I enjoyed, like play video games, on bad days. I had a habit for drawing on things I wasn’t supposed to draw on, even until I was 18. I was diagnosed with adult ADD soon after, and wish they had caught it sooner, because I’d annihilate a high school math class now.

FACT EIGHT.

My first girlfriend, and first kiss, was a girl named Lindsay. We broke up because I saw her kissing on a boy named Dave. She is now engaged to Dave’s cousin. It’s worth noting that this happened when I lived In the city of Ottawa, not when I lived in any of the small towns mentioned above. If you’re reading, Lindsay, thanks for breaking my negative stereotypes of small towns by proving such things happen in big cities.

FACT NINE.

I love ESG, Joy Division, The Knife, The Monks, Boards of Canada and Joanna Newsom. Maybe too much. I’ve proven to myself over the past few years that these are bands I am absolutely incapable of ever getting sick of. In fact, Music Has The Right to Children is probably the record I’ve listened to the most times in my life, surely dozens of times in 2001 when I discovered it, and at least one every month or two since. Deep Cuts got a similar amount of play when I found it in 2004 after Stylus Magazine (R.I.P.) ran a review on it, and continues to be a favorite.

FACT TEN.

These stories are all true and only slightly embellished, if at all. However, I am much less interesting than the sum of my parts, I promise.

I don’t know if anyone will read this, since I’ve had to do so much juggling with Wordpress and domains and nameservers and silly stuff like that, but http://brilli.am/writes is finally live!

If you’ve got bookmarks, you don’t need to update them, but you should, because that’s an awesome thing to do. http://brilli.am/writes is the link!

If you’re RSSing this, throw your old RSS feed away! On The Quixotic Engineer’s recommendation, I’ve got a FeedBurner feed, now. It’s here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/brilliam.

I’m intending to write a very clever thing or two in the near future, but for now, I’m just updating the world to my status.  I hope you’re all still reading, and that I didn’t break the Internet!