Also, it’s worth noting that I played Duke Nukem Forever on the PC. The game seems clearly designed for play on the PC, because of the pace of the shooting, enemy designs, platforming segments, etc… The PC also has no trouble with load times – which is a large complaint in the console reviews.

So, without further delay:

What Duke Did Right

Fast paced, guns blazing action

I was a large fan of Duke Nukem 3D. In fact, I played Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) with my original Duke Nukem 3D mousepad (which I must thank my wife for pulling out of storage for the occasion). The original game had a very strong focus on action – blasting aliens and pig cops with shotguns while strafing around. Sure, you could setup elaborate traps with tripwires and pipe bombs… But at the core, Duke Nukem was about kicking ass. And DNF continues that tradition. I can honestly say that blasting pig cops with the shotgun was completely satisfying.

There’s a lot of kicking ass to do in this game and a lot of different ways to do it. There were a few moments that were absolutely a blast and had me nostalgic for the original game.

Atmosphere

Those who played Duke Nukem 3D know that a large part of the fun is screwing around with the environment. For example, playing with computers, flipping lights on and off, putting your finger in an electrical socket, or getting sodas from the soda machine. In DNF, you can also play pinball, a form of “whack-a-mole” and video poker. I’m pretty sure you can play pool, sorta, but I got frustrated and quit trying on that one. The most enjoyable environmental interaction was playing air hockey. It was surprisingly fun!

But these little gimmicks aren’t the only thing DNF has going for it. The alien environments, casinos, and hoover dam are all very convincing and beautiful. There are certainly better examples of atmospheric level design out there, but DNF is by no means horrible. In fact, it’s quite good. However, one must note that I am making a distinction between atmosphere and fun factor. Some levels may be quite impressive and still very frustrating and boring.

Shotgun

The shotgun was good enough to mention all on its own. The other guns lacked a certain oomph, while the shotgun had everything just right. If you got up in someone’s face and let loose a shot, aimed just right, you’d obliterate most enemies. This was extremely gratifying and a lot of fun. I think I played through the entire game with the shotgun, only dropping it if the situation absolutely required me to do so.

Voice acting

Of course, Duke himself sounded just like Duke always has. He let loose with simple quips and bad jokes, left and right. And yes, they were horribly cheesy, but how horrible they were is what made them funny for me. To appreciate the game, one truly has to let go of their tastes a bit.

The other characters in the game were also done quite well. The other soldiers, the president, the women. There were no situations where the voice acting simply sounded out of place, forced or awkward. Which is truly rare.

What Duke Did Wrong

Gimmicks drag on far too long

This is perhaps the biggest downside of the entire game. There are moments where a cute gimmick gets thrust into the middle of the game. These kinds of moments can make a game great by breaking up the monotony. However, a gimmick is something that players get used to rather quickly. If it goes on for too long, it’s no longer a gimmick – it becomes a long portion of a game that people didn’t pay to play…

Specifically, there’s a monster truck portion to the game that reminded me of the moon rover in the first Mass Effect. These kinds of gimmicks are fun and cool for a few minutes. But since they are secondary gimmicks, they always seem to feel half-assed and tacked on warts of gameplay. And even if they are half-assed, that’s usually not a problem if it only lasts a little while and then you can get back to having your real fun. The monster truck sequence, however, dragged on across many levels. By the time I finally finished that sequence, I was almost ready to walk away from the game.

Duke does have some areas where they did this well, however. The forklift segments were very short and focused. I got to have my fun killing pig monsters with a forklift and then I moved on. The same is true for the underwater sequence. It lasted just long enough to get old and then it was over… So DNF definitely suffers in the pacing department.

Enemies get old too quickly

For the first half of the game, the variants of the pig-cops and alien guys were an acceptable amount of variety. Towards the end of the game, all of the monsters felt tired and boring. This is a very difficult challenge to overcome. Not many games get over this hump effectively. Halo seemed to get over this challenge by introducing an entirely new form of enemy towards the end. Half-Life (both 1 & 2) mixed up the enemies repeatedly, throughout the entire game. However, the list of games which overcame this sort of challenge is far shorter than the list of games that got over this problem effectively.

Frustrating boss fights

Some of the boss fights aren’t bad. The octopus alien with three breasts – that fight was fairly short and simple. However, as you get further in the game, you will run into some fights that are downright infuriating. Particularly the fights that have multiple stages – but still start out at the very beginning if you happen to die. The worst of these fights was the “Energy Leech.” This fight was slow, uninteresting and very difficult. I almost wanted to cheat, just to get past it. Similarly, there was a fight with a big alien on top of the hoover dam, which proved very difficult and annoying.

But what’s most frustrating is that while earlier boss fights made me want to scream, I beat the final boss fight in one shot by circle strafing the entire time and eventually killing him. This helped to make the ending very anti-climactic…

Checkpoint save systems

I understand that checkpoint saves are handy for consoles and make players actually overcome challenges, rather than rapidly saving their way through any difficult areas of the game. And yet, I don’t care. At all. I immediately dislike FPS games on the PC that don’t have a standard “save at any time” feature. I disliked it in the original Far Cry so much that I downloaded a mod/cheat or something that allowed me to save whenever I wanted. Give me a real save system. I have more fun saving when I want – whether that’s saving in preparation for a big fight, or saving in the middle of one because I just rocked the first half of it. I care about having fun, that’s it and that’s all.

Glitchy animations and enemy behaviors

You can really tell that DNF was put together in a somewhat haphazard way, when it comes to the glitchy animations. Sometimes NPCS will do strange things with their hands (strange things that may break the hands of a normal person) and sometimes enemies will get caught in strange poses (especially the pig cops). At the same time, the behaviors for the enemy NPCs get just as bizarre as their glitchy poses. Sometimes they will rush, sometimes they will stay back and sometimes they will just seem to forget that I’m there. The latter didn’t happen often, but you can be sure that when it did, I took advantage of it.

Two weapon system

Another concession to consoles, DNF requires that you only have 2 weapons at a time. Unlike Duke Nukem 3D, where you have a full inventory of guns that you can switch between depending on the situation, you get 2… This made the game feel more shallow than its predecessor. There was no feeling of “saving the big gun for something big.” Whenever something big was coming up, you could tell because of the big guns scattered around the floor, along with infinite ammo bins that you can rely on to keep the stream of rockets flowing. I know they had to figure out something to make it work for consoles – but this was a big step back for the PC.

Pacing

As I mentioned earlier, the pacing in DNF is its biggest flaw. There are many action sequences that are effectively broken up into moments of rest and many times this is done quite well. But the aforementioned prolonged gimmicky segments, such as the RC car or the Monster Truck driving, utterly destroy the games ability to be played for prolonged periods. While I put 7 hours into the game, I very infrequently played for more than 45 minutes at the time. I either grew too bored, or too frustrated and required a break. In the best FPS games, I can get sucked in for multiple hours and not even realize where the time went. For Duke, I am keenly aware of the time…

So, What’s My Verdict?

There are many people out there saying DNF is an utterly horrible game. I have played utterly horrible games before. DNF is not one of those games. It is not another Daikatana. (I should know… I played Daikatana all the way through. I still have the scars…)

And yet, reviewers like Ars Technica, GameSpot, Wired, Escapist, Joystiq and 1UP are disemboweling DNF. Check out the Metacritic pages for PC and Xbox if you wanna look at it all for yourself. What I find more interesting about this situation isn’t actually how good or bad Duke Nukem Forever is, but the nature in which the gaming community has responded to it.

A number of reviewers have taken some sort of moral stance regarding how offensive the game is. Personally, I’m surprised that anyone would even try. The game has always been offensive, chauvinistic, childish and lewd. This is not news. Feigning disgust about the tasteless jokes in a tasteless game is just a form of  sensationalist journalism. And if your disgust is sincere, then you may want to consider adjusting your expectations… In summary, writing an article about how incredibly offensive DNF can be is either an attempt to get attention, or the biggest no shit statement of the year.

Duke Nukem Forever may end up being one of those rare games that tells us more about the reviewing community than anything else. Everyone knows that gamers love hating on bad games. Zero Punctuation, while I absolutely love it, has exacerbated this  phenomenon in recent years. But recently it seems that the indignant enmity being frothed up in the gaming community has actually become our new entertainment medium. DNF, being so insanely hyped up and having absolutely enormous expectations, has now fallen into those sights and is getting utterly roasted. But it’s getting roasted unfairly.

Is DNF a fun game? Yes, at times. At other times it’s not much fun. And at certain times it’s downright frustrating or boring. It’s not a good game, but it’s not a horrible game either. Should you buy it? Maybe, when it costs $15 or less. Heck, if you’re bored and it’s $20, maybe you should go for it. But does this mean it’s a horrible game? NO. I wouldn’t even spend $5 on Daikatana, or many of the other horrible games I’ve played.

There’s definitely some fun to be had in DNF. But overall, it’s an amazingly mediocre game. If I were to pick an arbitrary score out of a hundred, I believe my final score would be:

65/100

It’s also interesting that when I had only played 2-3 hours of the game, I was thinking I’d give it a 70-75/100. Then the monster sequence truck happened…  

That being said, I believe anyone giving DNF a score lower than ~50/100 is showing their hand. If someone thinks DNF is deserving of something less than 50, then they are either inexperienced, cynical, or sellouts. (Sellout in the sense that they are allowing themselves to get lured in by the easy readership gains of hate and anger, rather than being good, objective writers). Of course, this really only applies to anyone reviewing the game for the PC. I imagine this game would be frustrating as all hell to play on a console. I certainly don’t plan on finding out.

The quick summary of my opinion: Brink doesn’t deserve some of the negative reviews it’s been garnering. The overall Metacritic score of 71 for the PC version probably just about right. It’s worth nothing the disparity between the console reviews and the PC reviews, however. Joystiq and 1UP, whom I usually rely on for decent reviews,  both gutted the game. But their reviews focused on the console gameplay, which I have not taken a look at. I’m tempted to buy a copy, just to see if there’s as large of a difference as I suspect there to be. And why do I expect there to be a large disparity in gameplay? To me, the game looks and feels as though it was designed to be played on the PC.

First, the gun control and aiming takes finesse. There’s no spray and pray and you have to adjust your aim rapidly. The sniper rifle CAN get 1-shot headshots, but the speed of the characters running and jumping around requires you to be a helluva shot. There’s even a perk you can get in the game, which allows you to shoot your own grenades to make them explode early… So much of the gameplay seems as though it would be greatly watered down with the slushier movement and accuracy of controllers…

Second, the gameplay mechanics are already greatly familiar to PC gamers. While not quite as refined and brilliant as Team Fortress 2, Brink does take a page out of the TF2 book. The objective based, class based gameplay is something the PC audience has grown into, while I don’t know that the same love for these mechanics exists on the console. But Brink also adds some fresh ideas into the game, especially with how rapidly you have to change classes, the weapon and body styles and the specializations you can unlock within each class. So I don’t mean to imply that Brink is just the same old, same old on the PC – there’s some freshness there. But it’s not entirely alien, or irrelevant.

Third, I don’t even know how I’d play the online version of the game effectively on a console. Someone will have to share with me how this works – but I’d have to assume it works much differently than the PC version. But before I got into how I now play the game, I want to share the story of how I got that far.

In the PC version, I played 3 solo missions and all of the challenges before deciding to go online. Once I did go online, I tried using the mission selector, which would automatically connect me with other people looking to play that mission. This went fairly well, I think. I’m pretty sure I was playing with and against real people and it wasn’t TOO laggy. It did take a few minutes to get the session going, but we won our match and it was fun. So after that worked out ok, I decided to check out the last game-mode in the menus: Free Play. That’s where I discovered how the game really shines – but I’m also not sure how it would work on a console.

Free play is basically the same thing as the server browser in TF2. You can update the list, find a server with low latency, connect and play. The lag is minuscule this way (25-35ms pings ftw) and you can be sure to find a server with a good bunch of people. So, after getting settled into using the Free Play browser, I’ve not revisited any other game modes. And I’ve now logged about 4.5 hours of multi-player game time, which I feel is enough to have a good sense for the game.

However, it’s definitely not a perfect game. There certainly are flaws. The largest drawback is the amount of content you get for the amount of money you have to spend. Team Fortress 2 is, without a doubt, a better game. Even after all these years. However, it only costs $10 and, even when it first came out, I don’t think it cost $50… Brink feels a little light for what I spent. The 8-9 maps do seem like they would have high replayability, but they certainly aren’t enough to warrant the high price tag.

The next drawback is the somewhat bland gameplay itself. It’s not TERRIBLY bland, but it’s not quite inspiring either. The freedom of movement promise from the early trailers, showing players jumping around on stuff in parkour’esque moves, is only partially delivered. The truth is, the maps aren’t exactly designed to encourage this sort of movement. Instead, most times, it’s more effective to play Brink like any other FPS. Sure, there are times when I have jumped into a space where I could guard something effectively, which I would not have been able to do if I couldn’t climb my way up there with the freedom of movement features. But I didn’t feel like a ninja, bounding across the rooftops. I felt like a heavy dude, slowly climbing up a box… And that “sliding across the ground is a good way to avoid enemy fire” tip that I read when a level was loading? It’s a lie. Sliding across the ground is a great way to look cool just before getting your balls shot off.

But one thing I have to strongly disagree with, in regards to the Joystiq and 1UP reviews, is that the maps are unbalanced. I’ve played most of them, from both sides, and won both ways. It depends entirely upon how well your team can gel together, work as a team, and push through or hold back the enemy. I’ve yet to experience any “draws” as they were described in the reviews I read. In fact, I’m not sure how you even have a “draw” since there’s no way for the game to end in a tie. That being said, I’ve also been very lucky so far, as I’ve only lost one match. So maybe that’s indicative of something.

So, overall, I’d probably give Brink an 7/10. It’s fun. I don’t feel entirely ripped off (only slightly) and I intend to keep playing it. The harsh reviews are a surprise to me, but I’m guessing the largest reason for them is that Brink may not translate well to the console. It’s a fun game, with tried and true mechanics that have a few new twists added to the mix.

Recently, I ran across Dan Willis’ blog, UX Crank, which I immediately fell in love with. Specifically, I was impressed with the relatively recent post of his, Build a Strong UX Foundation. It’s a topic I’ve thought quite a bit on recently, as I’m entering that phase of my career when I’m thinking more and more about how I can help newly christened designers be successful.

I enjoyed how he nodded to the issue of “UX” being a sort of wastebasket diagnosis of a profession, in regards to how our field loosely encompasses just about everything related to design. That inflammatory comment of mine could perhaps lead someone to think I’m dismissing my entire profession, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Though strongly worded, I must admit, the analogy seems sound. (and yes, I know how dangerous analogies are, let’s not go there…) We, as a group, are continually stumbling around, trying to get a grip on what it is we do, why we need to do it, why people should listen to us, etc… And we can’t resist putting a label on that struggle. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I do the same sort of stumbling every week as I figure out how best to fulfill my role in a sea of overlapping disciplines. But despite that continual struggle, I believe we’re coming ever closer to an understanding with blog posts like Dan’s there. Specifically, I have to call out this statement:

Our real value has never been about picking the right template for the right challenge; our value is to fully define a problem from the user experience perspective and then to craft practical solutions that address that problem in specific and measurable ways.

-Dan Willis, UX Crank

This paragraph gets to the core of UX for me. It’s something I’ve personally thought on for some time now, actually. The real value isn’t in picking a template. I would take it further – it’s not about picking a tool or a process. Instead, our value is exactly as Dan says – “to fully define a problem from the user experience perspective.”

I have to admit, I feel a temptation to leave off the “user experience perspective” bit and just focus on the definition of the problem. But doing so would remove what makes us special, what makes us unique. It’s what separates us from product management. We take business goals and needs and focus them through the lens of a user’s needs. And we do this in order to enhance them and increase the likelihood of business success. That’s the “secret sauce” that’s not really all that secret.

But I was tempted to leave all of that out because, frankly, that first part is complicated enough on it’s own! Fully defining a problem is a hard thing to do. And this comes to the topic of my post. (Curse you, verbosity! I shall defeat you another day…)

If fully defining a problem is the foundation of a UX practitioner – which I believe it is – then there’s a very specific aspect to defining a problem that I would call out for any burgeoning designer. And that specific aspect is:

Why?

It’s a simple question and a simple concept, but also one of the easiest concepts to overlook. It’s the most important question to have an answer to, in any undertaking, and the most valuable bit of information to communicate to any team of knowledge workers (which we ALL are). It’s at the very center of our entire profession.

Yes, there are other details of a problem that are important. The regulars: who, what, where, how – those details are all very important. But they are all crushed under the imposing weight of why. Why? Because answering “why?” gives us intent, purpose, meaning… The rest is context. Useful, but greatly diminished without a foundation.

Years ago, a brilliant colleague/designer I work with, Sylvania Dye, first revealed to me the power of understanding why. She introduced various root cause analysis techniques, one of which was the 5 why’s, which was a quaint but wonderful beginning for me in my analytical adventure. I’ve since grown beyond that simple technique, but the essence remains. In any of my undertakings, I simply must have an answer to that question.

The true power of why is that it provides a simple, quick escape from the perils of shallow thinking. I define shallow thinking as any situation where you aren’t being deeply critical of yourself and your activities, not to mention the activities of those around you. For example, perhaps you are only designing solutions to symptoms, focusing more on aesthetic than experience, or simply trying to put lipstick on a pig. In each such scenario, simply asking why can easily break you out of self inflicted doldrums and unearth real design problems worth solving.

But here’s the kicker – asking why isn’t always easy. There’s SO many ways to ask such a simple question. Let’s say you’ve been asked to implement a big circular button. Asking “Why don’t we have a big circular button” isn’t going to get you very far. Asking “Why do users need this button” will. And from there, hell, ask whatever questions you need in order to get to that core WHY. You can be sure that something kicked off the desire for this button and you, as a designer, need to know what it was.

I can guarantee you, if you don’t know why you are implementing that big button, you aren’t going to be able to deliver the best possible solution. And it’s your job, as a UX designer, to really know why. You can’t take things at face value. You can’t make assumptions. You have to do your best to really analyze the problems in front of you and understand why they are problems and why they are worth solving.

To unearth those oft elusive whys, you may have to ask the question quite a lot and ask quite a lot of people. But you have to do it without making people look stupid. That’s vital, because I can also guarantee that someday, someone will ask you that all important question and you’ll respond by smacking your forehead, ashamed that you don’t have an appropriate answer. (Which is fine – when that happens, search deep down in your gut and find the answer. You’ll probably find one. There’s a reason good designers have instinctual reactions/ideas. But be willing to kill your babies if you find out they are just fluff.)

The main point is that it’s NOT the job of a UX designer to just implement what they are asked to implement and make it as shiny as possible. As Alan Cooper frequently points out, users don’t know what they need. Likewise, neither do your teammates in many cases. Hell, I don’t know what I need most of the time! It’s a normal thing. But it’s our job to make sure our team has done that digging, to find real needs, to get to the core of it all. Until we do that, our ability to deliver amazing designs is a crapshoot.

And I’m not saying that asking why is the one tool that will get you there. But I strongly believe it’s the start. And if I could encourage any budding designer to start doing one thing well, it would be both asking and answering that question. (For starters, you could ask “why would it be useful to ask why?”)

Of course, next up, you can ask ask all sorts of other crap. “What problem am I really solving here?” “How far do I need to solve the problem?” “How do I know if I’ve solved it effectively?” etc… But that’s all for another overly wordy blog post…

You can now read further if you want to know why I didn’t particularly care for Dragon Age 2.

So, I can’t say my DA2 experience started off on the right foot. I was expecting to continue playing my previous character in some way, rather than being forced to play a specific character/storyline. This can probably be attributed to the fact that I’m just too busy to keep up with what’s going on in games, these days. So, rather than experiencing that major disappointment months ago when I could have read about their change in direction, I experienced it while reading the manual while the game installed. Needless to say, I went into the game with a skeptical eye.

Not many games can overcome a wave of early onset Alan hate. So it’s a huge indication of the quality of their writing and design prowess that BioWare was able to turn my disappointment around within that vitally important 5 minute period when I first start playing a game. But I remember my reaction exactly, when I finished designing my mustachioed mage hero. The story was intense and the gameplay was fantastic. Instead of a typical “go kill rats” story, it was a full blown James Bond opening, with epic battles and brilliant dialogue.

So, the writers at BioWare got to me again. Man, those guys, they are crazy talented…

After that, my high lasted quite a while. I’d say a good 4 hours of solid gameplay as my party explored Kirkwall. The characters grew, I learned new spells, met new people, got new loot. It was your typical wonderful BioWare RPG and I was thoroughly in love with it.

I ran all over town making money and building a reputation, so that I could invest in the grand expedition to the Deep Roads. I knew the Deep Roads from the first game and I really wanted to go back there – back where things actually mattered. I was so excited to get out of Kirkwall and start doing REAL things. The kind of real things with real impact on the real world (well, the real fantasy world anyway…). I was looking forward to seeing my impact from the first Dragon Age but also making new impacts with this character.

After much playing, I finally finished all the quests I could find and had more than enough gold to get to the Deep Roads. I was thrilled. We got in there and started killing Dark Spawn and it was fabulous. Treasure and glory awaited! 45 minutes to an hour later, it was done and we were back in Kirkwall, back where we started.

That’s when I got my first real glimpse of Dragon Age 2: Kirkwall Adventures. I wasn’t off on some glorious journey and I wasn’t going to see different parts of the world. Instead, I was going to take a brief romp in an uninteresting part of another world (which really is just repurposed graphics of the dwarven areas but I won’t go there… yet.) and then head back home. It was like taking a thrilling vacation to rural ohio, staying there for 4 hours, then driving back to my apartment to spend the rest of my weekend in my basement.

Except, now that I’ve returned to Kirkwall, I get to go into different buildings! And these buildings are entirely new, right? Not so much. Actually, they are all exactly the same, but some have doors that don’t open. Or sometimes I start out in a different place. Perhaps the designers hoped I wouldn’t notice?

And I’ve also grown, right? My character is a few levels higher. He has some new spells, some new gear. Yep. But the bad guys I’m fighting are more powerful too. Which is good, I don’t necessarily want to be a sadist who just runs around one shotting weak squishy things. But unfortunately, the meager amount of variety provided by new spells is counteracted by the balance between the enemies. Because they are stronger, the gameplay is identical to the last time I was in Kirkwall. And the bad guys look identical. So basically, I’m doing the same stuff, in the same place. Over and over and over. This continued until the very end of the game, more or less, and was the only thing preventing it from being a great game.

The saving grace for Dragon Age 2 was the writing and the characters. They were the only thing keeping me going through to the end. The storyline was interesting. even if the setting was not. The characters were engaging, even if what they were doing was not. If the writing was poor and the character interactions were dull, then I’d not even have finished the game and I wouldn’t be writing this long article. I’d have just posted “IT SUCKS” and moved on.

The writers at BioWare are brilliant. They need to be put up on a pedestal. I’ve actually read the Mass Effect novels, too, so I think that points out just how talented their people are.

But unfortunately, the writing can’t make up for the fact that the game itself was a miserable mess of content recycling. I can understand the motivation to re-use a few well designed environments over and over, but there’s a limit to how far that can go. The well designed environment quickly becomes normal and then even more rapidly becomes boring, when you have to repeatedly run through it in order to get to the story bits. Other companies have figured out a better sweet spot for content recycling – such as Bethesda with their Morrowind/Oblivion/Fallout games. Environments can look similar, that’s OK. But being identical makes things grueling. And trying to make them different by just locking doors – that’s insulting. I can see the map. I know there’s rooms on the other side of that door. I saw what you did there.

What made it worse is that the game consisted of 3 different chapters of the SAME content. I thought I had beat the game on multiple occasions, only to realize I had further to go. Which would have been great, if the environmental design matched the quality of the writing. I remember being sad when I beat the first Dragon Age, because I wanted more. When I beat Dragon Age 2, I felt relieved.

So, overall, Dragon Age 2 was a roller coaster ride, bouncing me between love and hate and leaving me with an averaged feeling of “meh.” The writing and characters were wonderful and the initial gameplay was brilliant. But unfortunately it was followed up with far too much repetition. A little repetition is fine, but they definitely crossed the line. I think the level of content recycling that they tried was a worthwhile experiment – they did find how far was too far. But unfortunately, it leaves me in the position of not being able to endorse this game. Not, at least, until it costs $25 or less.

So, that beign said, I must also point out that BioWare also wins a major respect points for standing up for minorities when it comes to the love stories in their games. I actually loved the fact that my mage could have a budding romance with the other male mage. Heck, it even got me a cheevo. Of course, my mage also had a romp with the lusty pirate lady. What can I say? Those characters… I loved ‘em.

The rule is very simple:

If I am not engaged within 5 minutes of starting playing, the game is crap.

I feel I should explain my reasoning, since many people have disagreed with me, or even pointed out how many great gaming experiences I have passed over because a game failed this rule.

Games are entertainment. Specifically they are interactive forms of entertainment. But primarily, they are entertainment. As such, I expect one primary result from engaging with them: I expect to be entertained.

Unlike some gamers, however, I am a hard-ass about this expectation. I expect a well designed game to come out of the gates swinging. To capture my imagination and have me in awe of the creativity of the development team, right off the bat. If any game does not present a glorious bounty of fun in my initial experience with the game, then they already made a fatal flaw. How many more flaws will I find later? Time is a finite resource – I have other games to play, not to mention actual work to do. (And I’m pretty sure that at any given moment in time, my wife wants me to do the dishes.)

So, this rule has some slide to it and it’s not my ONLY rule. I can be partially engaged in the first 5 minutes and if minute 10 provides some sort of amazing gameplay experience that knocks me on my ass, you can be sure I’ll finish the game. I could be thoroughly engaged in the first 5 minutes, but find that hour number 2 is absolutely grueling, which leads me to give up on a game. However, if the first 5 minutes of a game is grueling and boring, then it’s CRAP. PERIOD.

So, let me give you an example of a game that failed this rule. This is the game that I consider crap and many people disagree with me. It’s a game that many people loved and I’ve been assured that I missed out on a really great game because of my 5 minute rule. Perhaps I should have paid some kid to play the first 10-15 minutes so that I could eventually get to a good game. Wait, no, that would be stupid as hell.

So what’s that game? Super Paper Mario. Why is it shit? Because I start a new game and have to deal with this crap:

That’s 5 solid minutes of bleeps, bloops, shoddy dialogue and absolute torture. I don’t need to endure such horrendous crap to be able to get to a good game. Oh, and you can’t skip it. You can’t say “Hey, designer who should have been a crappy kids novelist – I’d rather not have to look at your bullshit. Please let me play the GAME that I paid to play.” Nope, you’re stuck there. You can speed it up a bit, but that just further enraged me.

Besides, I have other good games I can play.

Zelda: Twilight Princess was similar. The first 30 minutes of that game was full of me NOT DOING COOL STUFF. No, lady, I don’t want to find your cat. I want to hit stuff. With swords. That’s why I’m here.

So there you have it: The 5 Minute Rule.

You have 5 minutes, game developers, to prove to me that your game is worth my time. I’m not willing to give you more than that.

That’s right, I got a Windows Phone. I have been using my iPhone 3G for 2 years and absolutely love it, so it was a hard switch to make. However, the attractiveness of being able to easily develop my own apps for my phone was too difficult to resist.

I have been using the phone for a while now, so I feel like I can accurately describe my opinion of it. For those who want to just get my overall opinion and save themselves some reading…

Super Quick Summary

It’s a really nice phone.

Full blown review

Over the last two weeks, I’ve had ups and downs, but overall I’ve been quite happy with the phone. I don’t feel as though I’m missing a lot of functionality, switching from my iPhone 3G to my WP7 phone. Perhaps if I had the iPhone 4, I’d feel differently.

Main draw: Quick, useful displays of information.

The home screen, unlock screen, etc, all convey useful information. Rather than a simplistic app model, where I need to drill down into an app to undertake the simplest form of an activity, I get glimpses of the basics without any effort.

Let me give you an example. When I press the power button on my phone, I don’t just get missed notifications. I get a display of the next meeting I need to attend, in what room, etc… Then I also get to see how many emails I have, since the last time I checked email on my phone. It displays how many texts I may have, as well. It does all this with an appropriate level of UI footprint. IE: It doesn’t just fill the entire screen with text.

The calendar and email features are far better designed than the iPhone. And it’s all about the small things that are quite big in practice. For example, I don’t need to know how many unread emails I have. That’s fairly useless. All I need to know is how many emails I’ve received since the last time I looked. This little difference is the kind of thing that has an enormous impact on usage.

Another draw: Fluid interactions

I loved the gestures on my iPhone, but WP7 really has taken the gesture interface one degree further with the animations that they’ve created. Swiping down to the bottom of the screen doesn’t just pull the content out of view until it rubber bands back into view, such as it does on the iPhone. Instead, it actually shrinks the content to make the entire interface feel malleable and real. Again, a little touch that goes a long ways.
Sometimes these interactions can be glitchy, I have to admit, but overall, the phone feels very consistent and fluid. Going back to my iPhone, it feels fairly rigid in comparison.

Last but not least: Clean and simple

I quite like the Metro style. The glyph form icons in the toolbars, the clean typography, strong use of grids and the solid color tiles are a refreshingly simple approach to an interface. It’s not the giant wall of icons I’ve gotten bored of in both my iOS and desktop experiences. And as a UI guy, I can appreciate the breath of fresh air.

Big bunch of other strong points

• Solid Facebook integration. I’m actually using Facebook more than ever now.
• Xbox Live integration. I have some decent games, but more is needed before this is a huge draw.
• Voice activated calling and web searches are SOLID
• Bing maps are sexy as hell. I love how the map fades content in.
• Panos and Pivots. These UI controls are wonderfully simple and scalable. They are great to interact with and very quick to learn.
• Minimalistically beautiful UI. I know I already mentioned it, but just one look at the email reading experience and I’m sure most people will agree… it’s just plain hawt.
• Good reception, battery life, etc..
• The camera rocks. 5MP, HD video. I love that I can press the camera button when the phone is off, to quickly snap a picture.
• Back button. At first, I didn’t think I’d like it or need it. However, I now understand how wonderfully useful it really is.
• The Samsung Focus has a wonderfully beautiful display

So, what about the shitty parts?

This list is short, these are the only thing keeping me from saying “WP7 IS FREAKING AMAZING!” and trying to get everyone to try it out.

Voicemail SUCKS
Visual voicemail is a no shit affair, these days. It’s shameful that I now have to dial into a voicemail service and press number buttons to delete messages, replay, etc… I didn’t realize I was taking a huge step back in this arena when I switched to WP7. Had I known, I probably still would have switched, but I may not have been so intensely disappointed and frustrated when I tried to get to my voicemail for the first time. I seriously hope Microsoft has plans to include this in a future update. It’s almost as bad as having a smartphone that can’t copy and paste. (Oh, wait, it can’t do that either… hrmph)

No favorites list
I love that you just imported all my Facebook contacts and synched them up with the contacts that were on my SIMM card and whatnot… But now that I have hundreds of people in my contacts list, I need a “favorites” more than ever. I know, I can make it so that I don’t have anyone but people in my contacts list in my “People list” or whatever, but… Is it too hard to just be able to “Star” someone as a favorite and have them on quick dial? This is a pretty lame oversight.
Though, I am able to call by holding down the home button and saying someone’s name. So most times, I suppose this isn’t a huge problem.

Pandora?
Where is it? Come on.

Overly exact swipe behaviors
It doesn’t happen frequently to the point of consistent frustration, but sometimes the unlock swipe doesn’t fully engage. It engages enough for me to type in the first number or two of my password, but then it slides away and I have to start over. At times, there are little problems with the swiping gestures, like this. Another issue is scrolling vertically in a pivot or pano control. If you aren’t precise enough, you can sometimes pan left or right when you mean to scroll up and down.

It just feels like the phone could be a bit more forgiving of my fat fingering, overall.

Directions overlayed on the map
Don’t get me wrong, I love the map, but overlaying the “1,2,3″ markers indicating the steps of my journey… that’s just plain frustrating. At certain zoom levels, it becomes a clusterf$(|<.

What’s next?

Overall, I really like this phone. There’s no chance of me going back to my iPhone 3G. This new phone has fully integrated into my work/home life and it does augment it in a significant way. So I don’t feel like I made a poor decision. And I can’t tell you how relieved I am that this is true.

So, what’s next? My dev community subscription has gone through and I’ve started work on some apps in my spare time. The tools available to make apps are extremely easy to use and I’m really excited to get going. However, I’m still not sure if WP7 will really take off or not. Regardless, I’m very happy with my phone and even if the community isn’t huge, I’m going to have a lot of fun making apps and games for it.

Play it here!

I had been working with a special team at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh to create a Flash game to submit to the 2010 Independent Game Festival.
I was the sole developer for the game and also did quite a bit of the design for the gameplay. I’m very happy with how it turned out. We all learned quite a few lessons from the project, but I’d like to call out a few of my key lessons learned:

Don’t wait to start

When we first started working, I didn’t spend a lot of time figuring out Flash development before making our first prototype. Instead, I started developing a prototype in TorqueX in C#, since I was far more familiar with C#. I thought it was important to get a sense for our core gameplay concept and control mechanism – which is something I’ve picked up in my experiences as a User Experience Designer. What sounds fine on paper and what feels fine in implementation are very often 2 different things. This prototype ended up taking a few days of work, at which point we thought the core concept was solid enough to start working in Flash.

PushButton Components are teh Hawtness

PushButton Engine enabled us to rapidly create our game in iterations, through a very intelligent pattern of abstraction between the entities of the game and the logic applied to them. Ben Garney has this post on the advantages of their component system, so I won’t go into all the details. However, I will say that the component system allowed me to rapidly re-use and refactor logic without affecting large amounts of the code base. I was able to create new entity types through the combination of various components… And overall I was able to rapidly prototype and then iterate the game because of this pattern. It kinda reminds me of MVVM + Attached Behaviors in the WPF/Silverlight world…

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Pixie Dust

When the fairy in the game just flew about, without any particle effects, people were moderately amused, but generally bored.

Then I put in some fairy dust and everyone LOVED it.

This is just further proof that details count, a LOT. The little polishes and the extraneous, fun flair are not so little and not even remotely extraneous.

This is perhaps one of the biggest lessons learned. Details matter – they can be the tipping point between acceptable and delightful.

Test it early and often

Ok, I drink that kool-aid constantly because I do UX design in an agile environment. But it’s true. Prototype something, test it on real people, observe and iterate. Don’t design your perfect game idea completely, ahead of time…

If anything, we wasted too much time coming up with ideas and didn’t spend enough time making them.

I wish there had been unit tests

I have no idea how to do TDD in Flash, but if I could have done it all over again, I would have tried to do that. There were bugs and the bugs were hard to find… TDD would have probably ended up saving me time, in the long run.

Math is hard

Hey, I’m a UX Designer. I love making cool things, though. So I’ll learn what I need to in order to do it. But damn… Some of that math pwnd me. You programmer types are wizards. I really need to flex my math muscles more regularly.

“Specialization is for insects”

As the great Heinlein quote from “Time Enough for Love” goes… The only thing keeping you from doing something is yourself. I didn’t know anything about ActionScript 3, going into this. I knew general C based scripting, so I supposed I had a bit of a head start there. But I learned a LOT making this game and had a blast while doing it. I strongly recommend trying to program a game to any designer out there. The process helped me in my work, in that now I am even better at creating rich, interactive prototypes of software.