If I’m making sections of a game that will just extend the life of that game it’s like a crime, because you are wasting your players’ time. They don’t learn anything new from those levels. I want to make sure when we design games we feel responsible for our audience.

-Jenova Chen, founder of Thatgamecompany and creator of “Flower” and “Flow” in an interview in the October issue of Edge magazine

This is one of the first times I’ve heard a developer make reference to “wasting” a player’s time. That is often how I feel when I play what I perceive to be a “bad” game. I have too few hours in the day to waste on poorly-designed or overly-long-for-no-reason titles.

I’ve got reference-style article posted over at always-informative retro gaming site Racketboy.com. It’s in Racketboy’s “101″ series, giving the basics of gaming hardware through the years. I’m taking on the Nintendo Entertainment System in this edition. Tip of the hat to publisher Racketboy – who also wrote part of the article.

If you like what’s at Racket’s site, check out the forums. The community is really cool over there.

There’s something to be said for the infectiousness of having fun. I’m not talking about fun in the first person here, but rather in the third person. Even when you’re not participating in the good times being had, it’s easy to get caught up in the vibe if you’re watching someone who’s genuinely having a blast.

At least, that’s how it is for me. It’s a huge factor for me when it comes to live music. Even if the band in front of me isn’t necessarily playing music I’d listen to on my headphones, if the musicians are clearly loving what they’re doing – if they look like they’d be having a good time just playing in their basement with no one watching — then I can’t help but grin, bob my head and get into the moment. The same goes for watching Jon Stewart on the Daily Show — it’s not just the sharp satire, it’s that he clearly relishes dishing it out. I think this is why I like Coen brothers movies so much, too. Their films are fun to watch because I can just tell they had fun creating them. The Coens’ faces aren’t on the screen, but the love of the process still shines through in the end product. It’s indirect exuberance, but — at least for this viewer — it’s there.

It’s hard to get that vibe with most games, even indirectly. Games can be an impersonal medium when it comes to a direct connection between creators and consumers. I can only think of a few games — regardless of overall quality — where I’ve felt like I get a little bit of the developer’s personality in exchange for my thumb time.

I’ve recently found an exception: Alien Hominid HD, the stylish 2D run-and-gun game by indie developer the Behemoth (I recently downloaded the XBLA verison). It’s not just that AH is fun to play, though it is damn fun. It’s the sense of unadulterated joy that seems to be oozing through the screen from somewhere just on the other side of the code. Each ingredient in the Behemoth’s rollicking recipe, taken on its own, isn’t all that remarkable. Explosions. Cartoon violence and a few fart jokes. Tight, simple gameplay. Explosions. Huge character sprites and massive bosses. The distinct art direction. Flashy power-ups. Exploooosions.

But when you put them together and consider the subtlties of some of the game’s other traits, the result is undeniable. The Behemoth clearly had fun making this game — and they clearly have a deep-seeded love for the videogame cannon. This is a gamers’ game — one that knows what it is and one that has some soul.

The hand-drawn art by Dan Paladin is, for me, the direct descendant of the old-school pixel art of the ’80s and early ’90s: the work of one guy who can put his own stamp on the character at hand. The game mechanics are an homage to the run-and-gunners that devoured countless quarters and hours two decades ago. The massive character sprites are the kind of thing that used to blow away players back in the day. The bigger, the better. These guys aren’t just imitating; with AH, the Behemoth pays respect to the games that made people of a certain age fall in love with games in the first place. They began by flipping a videogame cliche inside out and pitting a single alien against an unending army of human baddies. And then there’s the sly references. At various times I see echoes of Contra, Metal Slug, Battletoads, Asteroids, Bosconian, Donkey Kong, Rampage, Missle Command and Smash TV. The hard-as-nails, pattern-heavy difficulty level is a throwback to the 1980s, as is the inclusion of the (admittedly goofy) Russian KGB. The Behemoth’s newest game, Castle Crashers, is a similar tip of the hat to 16-bit hack-and-slash games, though I’ll admit I haven’t explored that one as fully as AH.

Alien Hominid’s core gameplay is simple, and its learning curve is maddening. It’s a game I shouldn’t really like, let alone be so enamoured with. Yet I can’t help but have a great time with the game when the developers were so clearly doing the same as they created it. AH is now several years old, but the hand-drawn art and loving references to past greats will make it as classic years from now as the games that inspired it.

Every time UK gaming mag Edge does a top games list, I’m always amazed by their writers’ ability to capture the essence of a game, and do it so well, in just a few sentences. As a writer, I get a kick out of reading them. From huge narrative epics to the smallest purely ludic titles, they have an ability to nail it.

A couple of favorites from the recent 100 Best Games to Play Today list from the mag’s 200th issue:

No. 83: Peggle

Detractors who say it’s just random miss the point.‭ ‬You’d think the Ode To Joy might give them a hint as where to find it.‭ ‬Always rewarding you,‭ ‬always cheering you on,‭ ‬Peggle may just sway favour by charm alone‭ – ‬but beneath the purposeful goofiness of unicorns and rainbows lies an undeniable compulsion.‭ Yes,‭ ‬chance plays a large part,‭ ‬but it is precisely the struggle to impose your will over the random that forms its deadly addiction.‭ ‬It plays to the gambler in us,‭ ‬and be it by luck or judgement,‭ ‬triumph rarely feels as good.

No. 79: Pac-Man Championship Edition

There’s nothing wrong with plain old Pac-Man,‭ ‬but it took Championship‭ Edition to show us just how right he still is.‭ The basics stay‭ – ‬Pac-Man,‭ ‬ghosts,‭ ‬dots,‭ ‬power pills,‭ ‬fruit and a maze‭ – ‬but it’s all about how CE toys with them.‭ Mazes morph,‭ ‬paths of dots grow,‭ ‬ghosts accelerate,‭ ‬power pill patterns change‭ – ‬all governed by collecting fruit.‭ ‬Every game begins with a mind to the hi-score by chaining ghosts and ends with the panic of sheer survival.‭ The best thing about Pac-Man:‭ ‬CE isn’t the sense you’re playing with a classic,‭ ‬it’s that designer Toru Iwatani was doing the same.

No. 43: Portal

We’d never suggest that originality is‭  ‬the be-all and end-all,‭ ‬but it’s difficult to resist the thrill of the new.‭ ‬And what a rush of novelty Portal delivers:‭ ‬not in its technology,‭ ‬not in its perspective,‭ ‬not in its puzzles‭ – ‬not in any one element‭ –  ‬but in their combination into a deliriously thrilling,‭ ‬mind-breaking firstperson puzzle-platformer.‭ And that’s before Valve wraps it up in a story that’s weird,‭ ‬deadly witty and oddly touching.‭ ‬Few developers could smash genres together so wantonly and produce a game of this staggering level of class.‭ ‬For Valve,‭ ‬it seems like a piece of cake.

Dig that last little in-joke there.

If you haven’t checked out this latest list, you should. Yeah, sure, Ocarina of Time in the No. 1 slot is predictable and almost cliche at this point, but overall the list is well-reasoned and, as mentioned, well-written.

Via Ben Fritz and the Variety Cut Scene blog: Shadow of the Colossus is being adapted for the big screen.

Sigh.

This probably a bad idea. I’m sure to somebody in a boardroom at Sony (which published the game and is backing the film), it looks like a good idea. The game sold well enough. It’s a favorite of critics and players (including this one). Unlike a lot of action games, it’s incredibly moving and cinematic at times. It’s the only game to ever make me tear up because of an emotion other than frustration.

It’s pretty strange, then, just how poorly suited Shadow of the Colossus actually is for a film adaptation. There are practically no characters beyond the player character. There’s hardly any dialog outside of the intro and ending. There is zero action in between the 16 giants the player must first find, then figure out how to take down. Where other games fill the space between high points with pointless fetch quests or vapid townspeople, Colossus designer Fumito Ueda created a barren wasteland with nothing but miles of deserts, forests, lakes and ravines for the player to explore.

Defying common sense and conventional wisdom, this is actually one of the game’s biggest assets. The emptiness of the cursed and isolated world Ueda created imparted a feeling of loneliness on me as I made my way through it. Besides a few birds and scampering lizards, the only other souls I encountered were the colossi, the dead woman I hoped to bring back to life, and my horse. The solitary, sinking feeling I got as I wandered the terrain made the ending all the more bittersweet. I’d done what I had set out to do, but to what end? The girl is alive, but what kind of life will she have if she’s trapped in such a lonely place? For me, the desolate landscape was as much a character in this story as was the lively and life-like Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 4.

It worked so well only because I spent so many hours in that place, alone. Passively watching a shortened version of someone else’s journey there will not be the same.

Something else the game lacks that actually added to its effectiveness for me, again despite conventional wisdom: a back story. You have no idea where you’ve come from, or why the girls is dead. There is no cut scene explaining the details of some ancient myth about bringing souls back to life. There are no explicit instructions about why you must do what you’re about to do. So much of the storyline is implied, and I loved that. There is something about being in the shoes of a character that makes implied narrative work so well. Was it my fault the girl died? Was it just an accident? What will happen when she finally opens her eyes — if she ever does? What is this place? I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, and I would never try to, but for this player the questions fueled my motivation to keep going, even as other questions about the consequences of my actions began to creep up on me the further I went.

My fear is that the filmmakers will be tempted to fill in the spaces Ueda artfully left open. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz Blog, lead writer Justin Marks said he will try to avoid adding cliches like a cheesy sidekick. But in the same interview he also says SOTC holds such great potential for a film adaptation because there is so little to begin with and the writers can “start building” on what’s there rather than “tearing down” the things that won’t fit in the two-hour screenplay. Marks also says fans shouldn’t be afraid of adapting stories from one medium into another, citing how many of the greatest films were book adaptations. He has a point, I guess, but can somebody show me a game-based movie that comes close to being watchable?

So Shadow of the Colossus fans are anxious. Yet if the movie somehow manages to be well-done and true to the game’s spirit, might that lead a few more people back to Ueda’s modern classic? I thought The Watchmen movie failed to translate very well to the big screen, but it did get me to pick up a copy of the graphic novel, which I hadn’t read before. The hype turned me onto the book, and helped me appreciate the original work for what it was.

Maybe it’ll be a blockbuster and turns new legions of players onto the game. Or maybe Sony will go the next step in cashing in, and just offer those people the inevitable tie-in — Shadow of the Colossus: The Movie: The Game, featuring a third-person cover mechanic, rocket launchers and a multi-player death match mode sold seperately as DLC.

“It’s just a game.”

For people who care about the possibilities and promise of the interactive medium, those can be stinging words. They’re not entirely wrong or off the mark when it comes to most games. Many games are, indeed, just games. There are a few that have tried to reach beyond “just a game,” even if their grasp doesn’t always measure up. But often times, “just a game” is a phase used by people pulling a huge cop-out.

In a preview story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Atomic Games president Peter Tamte talks up his company’s upcoming shooter, Six Days in Fallujah. The WSJ reporter says Tamte and Atomic view Six Days as more documentary than mere FPS, even going so far as working with soldiers who lived the events depicted in the game to ensure accuracy.

“For us, games are not just toys. If you look at how music, television and films have made sense of the complex issues of their times, it makes sense to do that with videogames,” Mr. Tamte says.

…

“Six Days,” which uses actual events as its backdrop, is billed as having far deeper roots in reality and will be the first major game released about the ongoing war in Iraq. “We replicate a specific and accurate timeline — we mean six days literally,” says Mr. Tamte. “We track several units through the process and you get to know what it was like from day to day.”

To develop the game, Atomic is working with more than three dozen soldiers who were in Fallujah, consulting thousands of photographs (some of which were mailed on memory cards from Camp Fallujah), and looking at classified satellite imagery to ensure that the game’s appearance is faithful to the actual location. In addition to creating the game, Atomic will also use some of the material to create a training simulation for the military.

But asked if his game would have a moral component of some kind, or a slant, a message or theme, Konami – which is publishing the game — strangely backed away, saying:

“We’re not trying to make social commentary. We’re not pro-war. We’re not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience,” says Anthony Crouts, vice-president of marketing for Konami, the game’s publisher. “At the end of the day, it’s just a game.”

Some people are upset about that statement. Patrick Klepek was the first to shake his head over this (nod – that’s how I heard about it), and I think there will be many more doing the same in the next couple of days. I’m disappointed, too, and not only that Konami seems to be copping out. It’s disappointing that we seem to want to have it both ways. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise, however, that maker and marketer would have two different visions for the product.

Whether the developers like it or not, there inevitably WILL be some kind of messages gleaned from Six Days in Fallujah. As the WSJ story pointed out, nothing exists in a vaccuum. Everyone brings their own viewpoints, backgrounds and biases to the table when they absorb any form of media. Depending on how a player feels about the current war in Iraq, he or she will likely see what they want to see in the game. Any steps Atomic takes toward narrative realism in this game is a step toward a message — it just may not be a message they intend to send. I’ll bet you a few space bucks there will be no shortage of debate about Six Days once it’s released.

And if the gaming community feeds off of that attention, and holds up this game as yet another yard stick for how far the medium has come, then we have to be prepared to own up to the consequences, too. Did you notice that Atomic is also working with the military to create training software based on the tech used for Six Days? Do you not think that little fact won’t end up being used against the industry by the “murder simulator” wing nuts? We can’t have it both ways. Konami is muddying the waters for all of us, and I hope they know that. When the wing nuts come calling, the “just a game” cop-out won’t hold water. So don’t cop-out, Atomic and Konami. Own it. Own it now, and save yourselves and all of us the headache and embarassment later on.

In recent weeks I’ve been playing Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, a compilation of the best titles from the heyday of one of the gaming’s top developers. With nearly 50 games on one disc, the compilation is a great deal and an excellent chance to get your thumbs on a full body of work from one of gaming’s most distinct eras. Aside from being a nice collection of software, this compilation tells a story. But it’s a story that could have used some fleshing out. I love many of the games here, but I would have loved to see some more context about them in this release.

I’m a longtime jazz fan. What’s always fun about buying a classic jazz album — besides listening to the music — is that you’ll usually get some nice liner notes to go with it. When I was just getting into the genre and exploring its rich history, those essays usually offered invaluable insight into the music and the people who created it. It gave me a chance to understand a little more about why the music sounded the way it did and how that album or artist influenced what came afterward.

Retro videogame compilations are a great value, monetarily speaking. Each one of these games would have cost 60 or 70 bucks as a new cartridge back in the day. But as a piece of videogame history, most of these compilations offer piss-poor value, especially for new players. While one could argue that these compilations are targeted toward the nostaligia-hungry people who grew up playing the games the first time around, the inclusion of the Sega’s blue bomber in the title (only six of these are Sonic games) tells me otherwise. It’s an attempt at mass-market appeal by putting something recognizable on the cover. And if Sega really wanted to offer new players or even lapsed players something of value, they could do a lot better than two box art images per game and a handful of three-minute video interviews.

As I said, these games tell a story. These titles were ammunition in early years of the console wars, a time when consumer loyalty first took on the mutated form we know today. These games were Sega’s answer to Nintendo’s almost prenatural ability to turn out games that everyone wanted to play. In those days Nintendo released games at a pace of just two or three a year, but they almost always became instant classics. Sega couldn’t quite compete with Nintendo’s magic touch. It was Dreamworks Animation to Ninty’s Pixar (can you tell which side of the battle line I grew up on?) So its answer was to put out as many good games as it could, hoping for a balance of quality and quantity. Between 1989 and 1995 it pumped out an amazing run of action games that reflected its arcade roots, yet played to the strengths of the boxes it was putting into players’ homes across the world. This is the software that nearly won the war, just before Sega was eclipsed in the final few battles, mostly because of the company’s own blunders with marketing and hardware.

The reviews of SUGC left me disappointed in their lack of context, too. I expected the dumb “you can’t go wrong with X number of games for Y dollars” reviews on all the major Web sites. But even fan sites like Sega-16.com were missing something. Sega-16’s review even suggested none of the Sonic games should be included because they were in the last compilation. But then again, they’re writing for their audience — the people who DID play these games the first time around, and likely DID buy the very similar PS2 comp released a couple of years ago. So even if you think the context I’m looking for doesn’t need to be in the box because it can be found somewhere in the wilds of the Internet, I’d argue that it’s harder to find than you might think.

Those of us in North America and Europe are never going to get the kind of wonderfully put-together re-issues like the Sega AGES collection released in Japan. But I wish we could get something of both historical and monetary value out of these re-issues before they all go the way of digital releases.

Is this a video game? (Check it out it — it only takes a few seconds.)

I really like these little word engines. You’re asked a question — in this case “How Do You Feel About the Economy?” — and you input a one-word answer. The words everyone enters then crawl across the screen with the font size reflecting the frequency of use. The result is a real-time glance at the emotions of the user base. It gets even more interesting with the filter tabs to see words by people who are employed or unemployed.

So we have an input method and a video representation of those inputs. There is no ending, no fail state, no design to speak of. But just watching the crawls gives you a feeling, doesn’t it? Clearly, this isn’t a “game” by most anyone’s definition. But it makes me think about how even microscopic interactions are capable of evoking a reaction from me as a user.

Today a story about how playing “action video games” might improve eyesight made its way across the Web. The study subjects were found to have increased contrast sensitivity, meaning they could better see various shades of gray. Every once in a while you’ll get stories like this, which I think people must find newsworthy because the common perception of games is that they’ll rot your brain worse than meth. A couple of years ago it was doctors and surgery. There have been previous eyesight studies, too.

It would be nice for the popular perception of games to be turned on its ear for their artistic value. Headline: “Games found to have emotional impact on players.” Instead of seeing increasingly subtler shades of gray on a screen, we would be shocked to see shades of gray in characters and story lines. Of course, that kind of depth does exist in some games, but it’s just lost in a sea of brown corridors and bald space marines.

I enjoyed all the great coverage of GDC this past week from sites like Gamasutra and Ars Technica as well as the blogs and Twitter feeds of several game writers I follow. Nintendo head honcho Satoru Iwata’s speech was interesting not just for what he said (loved the Miyamoto insights) but for what happened afterward: another round of eye-rolling from the core crowd. Over at SVGL, a follow-up question came up yesterday: What else could Iwata-san possibly have said that would have pleased these folks?

I posted a short answer, and I’m posting it here, too. I thought about it for a while and really, I just don’t think there is anything Nintendo can so or say at this point that will please this group, which I count myself a member of. That might be a fairly obvious observation given the direction the company has been moving since it introduced the Wii in 2006. People have bitched and moaned about underpowered hardware and watered-down games during the last two years.

What’s so remarkable about how Ninty has “changed” recently is how little change has actually taken place. In 1985, Nintendo rolled out a somewhat underpowered box in the U.S. market that appealed to a wide demographic: kids, families, both boys and girls, and plenty of people who had never spent time hanging out in an arcade in ’80s. Every time I think about the idea that Nintendo used to be hard core but isn’t anymore, I think about my best friend’s dad, who beat the original Legend of Zelda — the godfather of all ‘hardcore’ games — and never touched a videogame again, ever. There’s your “new” Wii market.

One part of that original demographic grew up and became today’s core gamers. They expected more. More detailed graphics. More complex play systems. More buttons. More hours of game time. Like everyone else, Nintendo went along with the tide and catered to that crowd — after all, this was an audience it had basically created. Nintendo’s consoles each steadily sold less than the one that preceded it as the niche grew smaller, but louder. So they simply went back to the well, and here we are. We’re at a place where even the announcement of a new Zelda title doesn’t move the needle much with the core crowd. But I’ll bet more than a few dads out there will be playing it.

(Image: Infendo.com)

Yesterday I heard a pair of stories related to gaming air back-to-back on NPR. I’m an avid NPR listener, and in general I give it a lot of credit for very fair reporting on tech culture in general and games in particular. It’s probably the only MSM source where I can hear a gaming story and think that the reporter is anywhere close to “getting it.”

So it was today with a piece looking at two graduates of USC’s interactive media program and co-founders of thatgamecompany, Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen. The pair helmed the latest darling of the art game crowd, Flower. The story was less about Flower and more about how universities are now turning out a generation of game designers. A taste:

Those games studies classes were also where [Santiago] met Chen, who had come to the U.S. from Shanghai with the intention of studying computer science. He’d made games as a hobby when he was a teenager, but by the time he got to USC, he was disenchanted with them.

“Even though we grew up with games, at the same time, the gamers are actually outgrowing the games,” he says. “Very few games have actually achieved those qualities that would be interesting to an adult.”

Right after that, NPR finished out the hour with a spoken essay by Peter Sagal, host of the network’s cool news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” Sagal reminisces about growing up reading sci-fi novels and getting lost in virtual worlds. Aaaand then – you guessed it – he rips on the idea of virtual words that exist as code rather than written words. Here’s how it ends:

Today, you turn up your PC, put on your headphones, sign up for Lord of the Rings Online, and just, you know, go there. You can spend your whole life talking and playing with and beating up imaginary people, and from all accounts, many do.

Let me say, from the experience of years, that I’m not sure this is good for us. Real people — maybe you’ve heard this — are slightly more difficult to handle than imaginary people. Even more than Balrogs; and Balrogs, as everybody knows, are a pain. I’m raising children now — a challenge, by the way, on which J.R.R. Tolkien sheds no light at all — and I see them drawn to the flickering, dimly lit holes leading from our house to the other worlds — the TVs and movies and computer games — and I can understand the almost overwhelming urge to crawl through. But I also wonder if, like me, when they grow up and have to say farewell to childish things, they’ll have nothing real to let go of.

Let me say that I understand the concern, in general, with kids and too much screen time. I think any rational person who plays games can see that viewpoint, especially those who do have kids (though I don’t). But for Sagal to wax poetic about his beloved imaginary world while dissing another form of the same thing just because he doesn’t have the same attachment to it seems … a little weird. To be clear: he’s not lamenting that people today aren’t reading, or that science fiction isn’t what it used to be, or that a game doesn’t have the same narrative power as a novel. All Sagal’s doing, if I’m reading it right, is getting nostalgic and launching into the old “kids today …” speil.

What’s the point? Did he have some deadline to meet with this story? Maybe NPR’s editors had this thing in their back pocket and were just waiting for a chance to use it as a counterbalance to a gaming/tech story at some point?

I’m not writing to ding Sagal as much I thought his piece brings up a broader point. It’s so funny to me that attitudes like this still seemingly carry so much weight. We live in a computerized age. There’s no turning back; and while it’s only natural for us to wonder about consequences this strikes me as a classic example of wringing hands just for the sake of it.

Despite the needle moving in a pretty positive direction overall the last couple of years, games in particular still seem to stick in the craw for some reason. There’s a long tail of hand-wringing here that other pieces of the digital age don’t seem to experience. Take a look at the backlash a few years ago against MySpace and Facebook. I’ll bet you know a half dozen people who told you two years ago that Facebook was a waste of time, and yet now they have a profile with nearly 100 friends and take one of those dumb “Which 80s Band Are You?” quizzes every other day. Right now the target of choice is Twitter. Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts and the (supposedly) progressive Web site Alternet both had Twitter in their crosshairs in the last few weeks. The verdict in both cases: Twitter’s a banal waste of time that no one with a life should be messing with. …Sound familiar?

Yet I’ll be willing to bet that in two years we won’t see that kind of attitude about Twitter. But for games, the stigma persists, some 30 years on. This is why I don’t believe in the “give it time” argument from the people who say games today are what rock music was in the ’50s or what movies were in the early 1900s. Those mediums didn’t take this long to reach a point of wider acceptance, and they came of age in a time when the culture moved at a much slower pace. It’s on us, the community, to evangelize or die on the digital vine.

And honestly, it’s not about acceptance or validation. Really. Validation is for the insecure. Acceptance is for 12-steppers. So those probably aren’t the right words. It’s just about getting to a point where the culture is off our back about this shit. I don’t know what the word for that is. I just know we aren’t there yet.

I’ve been playing a fair amount of Peggle lately now that PopCap’s version of Plinko on steriods via Lisa Frank has been released on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s my first time really playing through the game. I have the iPod version, but the tiny screen isn’t the best vehicle for the game so I didn’t stick with it.

That’s despite Peggle’s well-documented addiction factor — it’s a hardcore wolf in casual sheep’s clothing. (Clive Thompson wrote a nice piece about this last week for Wired.) With a controller in hand and a big screen to let the rainbow colors pop, I’ve been having fun and fully hooked. But there’s another factor at play for me, one that’s very small but interestingly crucial.

It’s the sound. Specifically, the sound the pegs make as the ball lights them up in succession during each turn. Each time a peg is lit, the sound creeps up in pitch just a hair. And when you get a really good bounce, and you string them together for a great turn, the sound becomes music to your ears. Add in the choir-like “baaah” when the ball lands in the bucket (giving you a free ball) and you’ve got a super-satisfying sonic sequence. I’m telling you, ratcheting up those sounds is as gratifying as the number score I get out of a good turn. There’s something about it that connects with my gaming lizard brain and lights up the synapses that control the “aww, yeah” and “just one more go” parts of it.

It’s such a tiny little thing that I almost feel silly writing about it. But it’s definitely there, at least for this player. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it if I hadn’t been listening to a podcast with the game sound turned off. I felt like something was different, missing. It didn’t break anything — it was just kind of like tasting a recipe that didn’t quite have enough of that one ingredient, maybe garlic or cumin. Not a deal-breaker, but it lacked a little something. When I turned the sound back on, there it was.

Bink. Bink. … Bink. Bink. Bink … … Bink, Bink, bink, bin bin bin bi bi bi bi bi … BAAAAH!

I have no idea if the PopCap folks knew just what they were doing when they decided to do this. We talk a lot about highly-technical and realistic sound design in games — the erie groans of Rapture’s walls holding back the sea in Bioshock, the cinema-like mix of Uncharted, the synesthesia of Rez. But great sound design can come in small packages, too; so tiny you might not even notice at first, even while it grabs hold of your subconscious and doesn’t let go.

I spent some time this weekend playing a pretty nifty little game based on Greek mythology. No, not God of War — it’s Don’t Look Back, a Flash game by Terry Cavanaugh hosted on social/casual gaming portal Kongregate. Cavanaugh takes the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and retells it using basic inputs and extremely basic, Atari 2600-style graphics.

And it works – quite well, in fact. You begin standing and staring over a solitary grave in the rain. This being a platformer, you immediately head to the right and pick up a weapon, a gun. (Like I said, it’s based on the myth.) You’ll head down, down, down until you defeat Hades and meet a ghost, presumably of a dead lover. The game never tells you – there is no text, which is one of Don’t Look Back’s strengths. The ghost follows you back the other direction all the way to the grave at the beginning – on the one condition that you not turn around and look at her. The ending is somewhat left open to interpretation, which is unfortunately something we don’t often see in games. There’s a conversation about the meaning going on in a thread at the Kongregate forums.

The stripped-down visuals and simple but effective music and sound effects create a surprisingly imposing atmosphere as you descend into the depths of the Underworld. The enemies, even the massive Hades, are a single color: a flat shade of light red set against a backdrop of darker red and black environments. It makes Passage look like a next-gen thrill ride.

But the low barrier to entry is one of the best things Don’t Look Back, and games like it, have going for it. There’s no cost to buy the game, no expensive box to buy (well, OK, a computer, but who doesn’t have one of those?) and anyone with a few minutes and the will to play to the end can experience it and discuss what’s going on with the narrative.

But you won’t find much of the gaming cognoscenti talking about games like Don’t Look Back. You hear all about artsy/indie titles like Flower and Braid, and rightly so. They’re great games. And admittedly, Don’t Look Back doesn’t begin to approach the ambition of those games; not narratively and certainly not technically. Not even close.

But here’s the thing. One reason the Web is full of chatter about games like Flower and Braid is because gamers want badly for their beloved medium to be validated. We have crushing expectations when it comes to this stuff. But those games exist in walled gardens to which relatively few people will have access. I mean, one of the biggest storylines about Flower was the fact that this little ol’ downloadable game was what finally convinced Chris Sullentrop to drop 400 bucks on a PS3. So if we gamers, the enthusiast press and the gaming blogosphere are so bent on pushing things out to a wider audience, why are we always seemingly looking inward and highlighting games all of us are already playing — but that no one outside the walled garden can touch?

On Friday morning, the blogosphere, Twittersphere and media-fishbowl-sphere were buzzing about the epic smackdown that Jon Stewart gave CNBC madman Jim Cramer on their face-to-face interview on the Daily Show following a week of back-and-forth jabs between them. Some media pundits and friends in my own Twitter feed wondered why it took a comedian to say what the MSM couldn’t. It’s the old question: who’s watching the watchdogs?

At the same time this morning, another media story was brewing in game land – a post on the 2K message boards about a Game Informer story previewing the hotly anticipated Bioshock 2 seemed to reveal a load of new information about the game. Web sites and blogs quickly posted news stories on the details. Some pointed out that this was essentially still speculation. But then! Someone else from 2K got on the forum and retracted what they’d said, and everyone else had to roll back what they’d said, too. Which then led some to ask, who’s going to take these sites to task? Where’s the responsible journalism?

I’m sure it’s going to give some in game land to another reason to lament game journalism. But I’m thinking, what journalism, really? We’re talking about covering an entertainment medium. Do you really think these outlets are going to sit idly by while juicy details pour out of some other corner of the Web but not their own? Doubt it. We’re talking about a media environment where tagging an item as rumor – and then just reporting it anyway – passes as the height of ethical action. We’re talking about an environment where news that’s 12 hours old is as stale as a licensed movie tie-in game. The audience for this kind of info has largely grown up with the Web and message board culture, and they expect to know NOW.

I’m all for accountability — and I’ll admit I’m just kind of challenging the conventional wisdom here — but, what’s with the shaking of heads over this? Reviews should feature honest opinions free from the influence of advertisers, but the news side of the industry is just too wedded to the culture of the Internet to think that media outlets are going to altogether avoid stepping on a few of these kinds of landmines. We’re not talking about covering the White House or Wall Street here. And hell, those guys get it wrong all the time anyway. See: Daily Show link above.

I want to be clear about other thing here — I’m not trying to cop to the “It’s just a game, lulz” defense. I’m not one of those people. True journalism does happen. What I’m saying is that for this particular instance I don’t see a way for the enthusiast press to get themselves out of the corner they’re painted into. They’ve partly painted that corner themselves, but the audience is also to blame. Gamers aren’t going to stop clicking on links that promise rumors anytime soon, nor should they. Am I wrong in thinking that rumors and speculation are one of the basic tenets of tech journalism? Should we block out all those Apple rumors? Might as well close down the Internet.

Last week Iroquois Pliskin wrote about the need for journalists — and their real-world, diggin’-up-facts, ask-the-right-questions skills — in game journalism. What he’s asking for is a little different than the (now worn-out) call for “new games journalism” to rise up and smote the likes of your typical reviewers and their 10-point scales dead at their keyboards. What Iroquois wants to see more of are the folks who cover the industry the way a competent and insightful business reporter would cover any other multi-billion dollar industry. That takes chops — chops that the people who usually land jobs as gaming “journalists” don’t really have. Those people usually come from the retail ranks of EB, while someone with the proper chops is more likely to come out the Carter School at NYU.

That’s not to say the chops can’t be gained. Believe me, a degree means next to nothing in journalism, probably moreso than any other so-called profession. It’s all about experience, hunger, and most important, curiosity. And it’s getting better all the time in gaming. On an industry conference call day my Twitter feed is filled with updates from pros covering the financial side of things (hit Iroquois’ post for some great links).

But the question is one of audience. This is still an entertainment medium. Even if there’s huge money behind it, I’m not so sure most of the people who typically read gaming news want to know about a publisher’s debt-to-income ratio. To be sure, there are those who do, and I would imagine that group would include developers, retailers, gaming Web site editors and the hard-core geeks who are a bit more well-informed than the average forum lurker. We’re talking about insiders, basically. A niche within a niche. Is that audience big enough to justify the more reporting-intensive (read: costly and more time-consuming) work that such journalism requires? I would hope so, but that may not be realistic. Not when whole newspapers are closing shop. (Lots more to come – go? – in 2009, methinks.)

Look at another huge, multi-billion dollar entertainment industry: major-league sports. In today’s world, sports are covered wall-to-wall across every medium. But for the most part, sports journalism still consists of covering the games on the field. Sports radio isn’t that different than the guys on your favorite gaming podcast who talk about what they’ve been playing. Occassionally there will be something in sports that requires more reporting and honest evaluation, such as public financing for stadiums. And very occasionally a story will come along that turns the industry on its ear, as with steroids in baseball. That story was largely broken apart by two newspaper reporters who did a hell of a good job with some in-depth reporting. But that’s rare. Most sports fans, and I’m one, just want to know the game day information even if they are deeply interested in a few of the major “news” topics in the sporting world. If you’re a sports fan, ask yourself this: would you rather watch SportsCenter or Outside the Lines? Would you rather check Deadspin, or read the latest book excerpt in Sports Illustrated?

There is another component to all this that’s getting better, but still not there yet: covering the personalities who make the games we love. Reporters who cover movies have this down to a science. But there are a lot of roadblocks to that kind of coverage in gaming today. The “stars” of a game aren’t real, and it takes a team of hundreds to make the blockbuster titles that grab headlines and rock the NPD charts. The emergence of star developers like Hideo Kojima, Cliff Bleszinski, Ken Levine, and interesting indie devs like Jonathan Blow are making this style of journalism more feasible. But in my opinion we still need more devs step up to the plate and be willing to open up to the press. Then we’ll need reporters with feature-writing chops to step up and make the most of it. I think the potential audience for that kind of reporting might be bigger than the audience interested in the nuts-and-bolts industry side of things. Put those together with some smart criticism and you’ll have a mix that a mainstream audience could eat up.

Which leads me to this: Is there an outlet that’s currently doing all three really well?