Grumpy Gamer

OMG! Someone Just Won a Copy of DeathSpank!

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:17:46 -0700

Wow! That was an overwhelming number of people who wanted a copy of DeathSpank! Many thanks to the hundreds of people that painstakingly read every one of those reviews looking for the quotes and typos and entered the contest.

And now...Congratulations to David Or on his stunning victory!

David's name was chosen randomly using a scientifically proven random number from random.org.

Win a Free Copy of DeathSpank on XBLA!!!

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:14:29 -0700

Making games is hard, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Long hours deep in the game mines, chiseling nuggets of game design from crusty black walls, sucking in death at every breath. And who does this dangerous work? Games designers like myself? Don't be crazy, we get children and puppies to do that part. I work out of a nice air-conditioned office with an espresso machine.

But in the end, it's not about who lived or died to bring you an awesome game like DeathSpank, so let's not trifle over small details like "laws" and "morality" because much like that delicious tofu you're eating, you don't really want to know where it came from.

Instead, let's enjoy a massive DeathSpank review round-up:

Rejected Gamer
California Literary Review
Onion's AV Club
IGN
Games Radar
MTV
GamersHell
Jeux Video
Aggro Gamer
Game Pro
Gammabit
3D Juegos
Eurogamer
Gamer Revolution
Kataku
1up
Video Gamer
Nu's Views
Ars Technica

I know what you're thinking: "Damn, I really want to play DeathSpank, but I need to feed my family". Now, I know how I'd choose (and I won't judge), but I might have a solution to your recession woes, and that's a free copy of DeathSpank for XBLA.

Scour the above reviews and find the following quotes:

"...gorgeous fairytale landscape seems to sprawl out forever..."
"En DeathSpank seremos un justiciero de id�ntico nombre embarcado..."
"The land of... I'm not sure, it has a name, but the main town is called Pluckmuckel..."
"But like great satire it works both as an amusing commentary and as the subject of that commentary."

Drop me a line HERE and tell we where they came from.

Please use a real email address or I can't send you a code if you won.
No cheating, this isn't college.
Don't post answers in the comments.
Don't forget to declare it on your taxes.

I will randomly choose one winner from all correct entries sometime tomorrow and post it here.

DeathSpank!!!

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:33:20 -0700

You didn't think there was actually a game did you? Oh, no, no, all this hype was about re-releasing these two DeathSpank Grumpy Gamer comics.

DeathSpank Coming Nowish.

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:41:45 -0700

Is it snowing in Hell? Are pigs flying? Are the Republicans admitting to global warming? No, it's actually the 25th seldom mentioned sign of the apocalypse: DeathSpank is poised to hit PSN, XBLA and [REDACTED] on July 13th, July 14th and [REDACTED] [REDACTED]th.

You've got a few weeks to come up excuses for not showing up to work for a few days. Might I suggest: "Go to hell, I'm staying home to play DeathSpank". Tell'em Ron said it was OK.

So in celebration, please enjoy some early concept art by Clayton Kauzlaric. I'd show you some of my concept art, but then you'd go blind and the healthcare in America sucks.

Game Designer+Artist or Game Designer+Programmer

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:26:58 -0700

I'll be honest, I used the + signs in the title because I know they screw up some RSS feed readers and I'm just that kind of person. My next post will have lots of & and ? symbols and then we'll move into utf-32. The Internet is a house of cards ready to come down with one seldom used chinese character.

But onward we march, content in our ignorance...

So, my question is: would you rather be a game designer that is also an artist, or a game designer that is also a programmer?

For the sake of this brain twisting exercise, let's assume that you can't be a game designer+artist+programmer, because that combination just goes against god. And also, for the sake of argument (and because I like to argue), let's assume if you're an artist or programmer, you have no talent in the other profession, and by no talent I really mean no talent.

I ask this questions because I fall into the second category. I started programming back when disco was cool. I started with Basic on a CP/M machine, then moved to Pascal before discovering Z80 assembly language. I had always heard assembly language was fast, but I was not prepared for the shear speed of it over Basic. Running my first assembly language program was a religious experience. My eyes stared wide at the screen as it filled with the @ character in what seemed to be instant. I literally said "oh my god" and that was the beginning of my 25 year death march known as the game's industry.

I learned C and C++ while working at Lucasfilm to build the SCUMM compiler and later when the SCUMM engine moved to the PC from the Commodore 64 and I have continued to program every day since, recently learning objective-c as I dabble in some iPhone games in my spare time (objective-c is very cool, it took three days of swearing before it clicked).

But the problem is I have no art talent. None. Absolutely zero. When I try and do art, it destroys nearby things that might also be art. I'm like art anti-matter. When my art comes in contract with real art, they annihilate each other. It's hard to tell if my prototypes are any fun because people are always shielding their eyes and gasping when they see my art. Even my stick figures look crappy. I know some programmers that draw crappy art that looks cool because it's so crappy. My art is just crappy. Clayton Kauzlaric did all the art on Grumpy Gamer, mostly out of pity, I assume.

Some examples of my art:

But I know some artists that feel the exact opposite. They produce brilliant looking mock-ups of game ideas, but can't program enough to produce even a basic prototype in flash. They feel the same frustrating that I do.

So which is better?

Big DeathSpank Media Tour Update!

Mon, 10 May 2010 10:55:24 -0700

Sorry for this update being late, I've been busy prepping for my possible Supreme Court nomination by re-watching The Wire and then just this morning I wake up and hear that Obama has nominated some "lawyer" to fill the opening. When will this kind of preferential treatment end? It's the legal elite trying to keep the common man from the highest court in the land. What are they so afraid of? DeathSpank maybe?

Oh, speaking of DeathSpank, here is a round-up of the mega press tour I did a couple of weeks ago:

And because I occasionally get asked this question, a fine young gentleman named Sean Howard did a chunk of the writing on DeathSpank. When it was first announced that I was making DeathSpank, he sent me emails for months asking if he could write dialog for it, then mostly to get him to stop bugging me, I sent him a writing test and...well...it was damn funny! Not Supreme Court funny, mind you, but funny!

Roger, Roger, Roger

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 22:09:33 -0700

Roger Ebert is at it again, claiming that not only are games not art, but that they can never be art.

Roger, Roger, Roger.

Over the past year I have gained an immense amount of respect and admiration for Roger Ebert. I read his blog everyday and it's damn good, some of the best and most insightful writing on the web (or anywhere). He's gone through some very terrible and personal issues with cancer and hasn't let any of it stop him. I remember watching Siskel and Ebert back when it was on PBS and credit it as one of the reasons I became so interested in movies and storytelling and almost sending me to film school rather than down the path of making games.

But I didn't go to film school, I decide to make games instead. Why? Because games gave me a creative and artistic outlet. They allowed me to express myself and my ideas and my characters and my stories.

The games I was playing and wanted to make were adventure games and I didn't see much difference in how they told a story from how a movie told a story except they were interactive. I saw them as an extension of the linar narrative of film. I saw them as not only a way to tell a story with real characters, real emotions and real ideas, but one where the viewer got to participate in the story. They got to touch it and twist it and become part of it and make it their own.

I can't imagine anything more artistic than connecting with your audience in that way. It's unique to the way games tell stories and we've only begun to understand it's artistic potential and power. Movies will never go away, but neither will games that tell important, interesting and deep stories and we're just getting started.

The problem is Roger has not played the right games, or any games. Roger is a master at understanding movies and there is no person I respect more than him when it comes to understanding film and it's importance.

But games? Not so much.

Here is my challenge to Roger: Why is Monkey Island not art, yet, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie is art?

I will hold the story and characters of Monkey Island up to the Pirates of the Caribbean movie any day. The story in Monkey Island 1 and 2 is as deep and complex and interesting as that of Pirates of the Caribbean. The characters are as living and real and developed as you'll find in any film, I'd even argue more so since you can have conversations with them and explore the nooks and crannies of their stories in a way a movie or book cannot.

So, Roger, play Monkey Island. Really play it. Don't have someone that has played it tell you about it. Don't get someone to play it for you. Don't read about it on Wikipedia. Play it and let it swallow you and then tell me it's not art.

Update:

Roger replied that he did not think Pirates of the Caribbean was art.

If that is indeed what he thinks, then his argument does make a little more sense to me. He's not saying that film is art, but that some film is art. Ok, I can believe, under his standards, that no game has reached the level of art, but to say they never will be art is naive and history will prove as such.

Although, he did say "no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form", so I guess that is his escape from the hammer of the future, but it can not excuse the fact that he's never played or tried to understand games at the same level that he does film. If he wants to continually bring this issue up, then he should at least become a quais-expert in it first or at lease try to understand it.

And no, watching YouTube videos of games doesn't count because it's not experiencing the one thing that makes a game unique and that is how you interact with it. This would be like critiquing film by only ever reading scripts and never watching the movie. There is an entire layer that is missing.

Roger also mentions in his essay "Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?" I would ask: why are you so concerned that they are not? You're the one that keeps bring this up, not us.

Just so you know...

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:23:28 -0700

I wanted to let all the Premium Gold Level Grumpy Gamer subscribers know that I left Hothead. When I started working there two years ago, my goal was to make DeathSpank the most awesome game ever made and have it win a Nobel Prize and the early word out of Stockholm is that DeathSpank is neck-in-neck with some string theory dweeb (eleven dimensions my ass).

As DeathSpank ends the creative and production phases and start down that long and winding road of certification and testing of the XBox and PS3 and [REDACTED] versions, it's looking quite amazing and is damn funny. So, to quote my childhood hero George W. Bush: Mission Accomplished.

I will be working closely with EA and Hothead on the PR for DeathSpank as the release date of [REDACTED] draws closer.

I have also vowed to blog more and try and remember my twitter password.

April Fools' Day #6

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:17:52 -0700

Hard to believe that I've had a blog for six years and for each and everyone of those six action packed years Grumpy Gamer has been 100% court ordered April Fools' joke free. Bested only by Christmas, April Fool's is my least favorite non-denominational holiday.

LHC

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:46:27 -0700

If you're like me, you probably worry about the temperature of the superfluid helium cooled superconducting magnets that line the 27 kilometer Large Hadron Collider located somewhere in the country of Europe.

But you can stop worrying, as I have, and just go to the new Cooldown Status Page to get up to the minute live temperature readings. If you notice any anomalies I'm sure there is number to call, but I feel pretty safe knowing that Alice is on duty in sector 12. That is until that backstaber Atlas from sector 81 decides he wants her job and start spreading rumors. Atlas is a jerk.