Łódź City Stories

Some time ago this was posted as news on Kotaku, but since it makes me chuckle everytime I pass nearby, I've decided to share it with you as well.


What you can see on the photo is a local pawn shop in my hometown of Łódź. It is one of many small establishments, some of which function on the very edge of law, selling, ahem, 'used' mobile phones, for example (this particular place is all right, but not all of them are). Since almost every wall in the center gets immediately some vandal graffiti, some shops ask local 'painters' to paint the shop for them, and then others leave the façade in peace, because it's considered bad manners to paint over others painting.


What gives it a funny twist is that the graffiti on wall depicts Maria (on the right, which I add just in case...), a character from Grand Theft Auto : Vice City, the game in which player plays as a mafia thug making his way to big money. And yes, pawnshops are something that is very much in scope of the game. Therefore, there's certain irony in it, albeit I doubt if it was a concious decision.

As for the mention on Kotaku, it was me who sent it (that's how I received my account there in the first place), because I didn't have my own webpage to publish it back then. The news even made it to top stories. Personally, I loved the comment "I wonder if they sell hot coffee there?"...

Announcement

Some of the Polish readers of CD-Action magazine may remember coverage of Tokyo Game Show 2005 that appeared there two years ago and couple of months later, in 2006, another article about Japanese arcade game lounges. I happen to be the person behind it .

CD-Action covers

Although it hasn't been the first time that my texts were being published (I wrote to Gazeta Wyborcza among others), these were my first digital entertainment related articles published in the mainstream computer magazine. I have a regular job in IT industry, but I like to occasionally write something to different newspapers as a freelancer too.

The title "Land of the rising arcade" was not my idea, I swear...

The photographs accompanying the text were also taken by me, too (although I used photos by Guillaume Viry and Dariusz Markiewicz as well, with their kind permission). If you check the timeline, you may also notice that at that time this webpage didn't exist yet. You can have a look at these articles here.

High-res photos of my two articles

The cooperation with CD-Action was excellent and I enjoyed it a lot to be working with them.

Therefore, I am very pleased to announce that we have once again joined our forces with CD-Action and this year I will be covering Tokyo Game Show 2007 for them. According to our initial agreement, there should be a full written coverage appearing in the magazine anytime after TGS and also I will be sending the news out for publishing on their webpage (practically live-blogging). However, fear not, I will be updating Barts' News in the same time, so you won't miss anything here.

Polish team on Tokyo Game Show 2005

As for the organisational matters, the ticket is already bought and lies in my drawer, the agreements are made, the last remaining thing to do is to complete the registration for Business Days (the part of Tokyo Game Show that is not open to the public) - I will be sending out admission request anytime soon. Still, there's plenty of time, last years ticket prices and registration for Business Days were open late summer, so we're following the schedule this year too.


Personally, I can't wait to visit Tokyo Game Show again...

Demo impressions - Lost Planet and Infernal

Disappointment - I do use this word a lot, especially when I write about most of the new games. Today I'll talk about two disappointments, a major one and a minor one.

The first of them is the game that is one of the games that I almost bought an Xbox 360 for - Lost Planet by Capcom. Therefore I was really happy when I heard that it will arrive on PC as well. When the demo arrived, I immediately downloaded and installed it. And then...


Okay, so the game itself is not that bad, but not as much fun as I would expect it to be. The control scheme is quite convoluted. I kept dying a lot and it became frustrating. But the worst thing were the hardware requirements. My computer is only one year old machine, equipped with AMD64 3000+ processor (effectively 2GHz), one gigabyte of RAM and NVidia Geforce 7600GT graphic card - and Lost Planet was definitely unplayable on it.


I understand that Xbox 360 has three processors, dedicated graphic chip and whatnot, but for heaven's sake, programmers at Capcom must know how to perform some optimizations, right? Right? Well, apparently, no, they don't. I know it's not the easiest task, but come on, if I was writing my code so badly from the point of view of performance, my company would probably fire me.

The second game is not that bad, actually. In this case the sense of disappointment comes from expecting too much of it. The game in question is Infernal, coming from Metropolis Software, the company that Adrian Chmielarz (the one that brought us Tajemnica Statuetki, Teenagent and more recently Painkiller) had created.

The story contains all the elements that normally tend to make me a happy man - eternal battle between Hell and Heavens, secret agents of both sides, supernatural powers, zealot monks and all that paraphernalia. I especially liked the animated title screen (below), because it reminded me of comic books I used to make in high school.


Unfortunately, the game is not that great. I have to give credit where due - it looks very nice (although a little... artificial, a little too sterile), with lots of special effects, fluid animations and all the usual bells and whistles, but the gameplay itself is rather monotonous and repetitve. And this is a serious charge, your honour - how can you make a game with teleportation and soul-sucking bland?


The AI s not particularly smart, the environmental puzzles are not very inventive (honestly, applying the teleportation concept a little more might really make the game much more interesting), weapons don't convey the sense of power too well either. So all in all, game is rather mediocre, but at least it's optimized and looks pretty without asking for another 1000$ worth of hardware.

I think that the reason behind it is that Metropolis House is a Polish Company and I suppose they are more realistic in estimating what PCs people have (hint to Capcom : recently Valve published its hardware survey, go have a look at it). Or maybe Capcom could ask Metropolis House developers for some lessons of graphical programming and game optimization, whilst the Poles could use some more budget and maybe a Japanese chara designer. Doesn't it sound reasonable?

And as for the conclusions :

• you don't need to be a very big company to make a decent game (but...)
• it takes more than angels and deamons to make it interesting (and...)
• it takes more than mecha and alien bugs to make it interesting
• snow effects and explosions are pretty but not everybody has Core2Duo and Geforce 8800GT to appreciate them
  
• it's hard to find a good PC game these days
• Poles are better coders

Prince of Persia revisited

Just a short, but nevertheless interesting video, that Grocal has drawn my attention to. As you might remember, I recently wrote about the Prince of Persia remake on Xbox Live! - and I generally liked the idea. The video in question shows the differences between original Prince of Persia on PC, Sega Genesis and Xbox 360 (there should be also ZX Spectrum and Amiga version for the sake of completeness, but...).

Enjoy!

Behind the scenes - OpenOko

I had the pleasure to bid a visit to OpenOko, small Polish game development company, and spend some time with Marcin, the lead programmer and, incidentally, my friend from high school.

Hidden in one of the numerous XIX century tenement houses of my hometown of Łódź, the studio occupies surprisingly nice apartment - in contrast to very steampunk'ish (to put it diplomatically) interiors through which a visitor has to find his way first.

The corridors and staircases leading to OpenOko could
one day be used as a level in one of their games

So far the team has produced a couple of very low-budget games that they are still ashamed of (judging by the fact they are not listed on their official site) and one more complete product - Dragonblade : Treasure of the Cursed Lands. The game has been distributed in Russia by Akella and entered the top five of best selling games by the end of 2006. Curiously enough, you won't find a mention about it on their English website, only in Russian - click here to see it. In Poland you can buy the game in 3Kropki internet shop - check that it has different cover artwork.

Dragonblade trailer on YouTube

Dragonblade is definitely not Half Life 2, that's true, the influences of Witcher and Painkiller are obvious and the game has its share of issues, right, but nevertheless it features some interesting models, good lighting, and generally allows the player to get some shooting/fighting action in dark fantasy world. On a side note, I dare say that the main protagonist bears slight resemblance to Dante from Devil May Cry as well - but maybe it's just me. If you want to learn more, here you can download the offical English game presentation.

Dragnoblade : Treasure of the Cursed Lands

Unfortunately, in Polish reality the choice is simple - either the game costs 20PLN (about 7 USD) and sells in large number of copies, or it costs 50PLN (18USD) and sells in too few copies for the company to make a living.

The reason for it is the fact that target demographic are essentially male gamers 12 to 16 years old - they are the majority of game market audience. For them lack of originality (yet another 3D shooter) is not a problem, because they want another game similar to what they already know. They don't have too high expectations of cheap games either, because being realistic in their judgements they can tell the difference between Valve and OpenOko. And they definitely don't have big budget to spend on the game.

Therefore, it boils down to sad, but unfortunately very real-life choice : either you make a very polished game, which impacts development time and the cost of final product to the point where it becomes not commercially profitable, or you consciously make a game of lesser quality, but the development cost is lower and therefore the gain margin allows you to keep on going.

Inquisitor - one of the titles in development by OpenOko

If you are a gamer for longer time (like me), you surely remember one or two studios that gave us truly great titles and then ceased to exist due to financial reasons? Well, the economic reality in Poland is even more harsh than in States, therefore managing a game development studio requires making this kinds of difficult decisions.

But don't worry, with every accomplished project the arsenal of tricks and special effects that OpenOko team has up their sleeve increases. Each new game contains some elements which may then be used in the next games, such as nice bloom effect, very realistic water, lens effects, smarter AI and so on.

Please note the water reflections, the haze effect and the amount of detail in weapon

Already their new project is shaping up nicely, judging by what I have been shown during my visit. Contrary to what you may read on OpenOko website, the next project is going to be a tactical shooter, codenamed GBR (from Russian Grupa Bystrego Reagirowania - Quick Response Group, as in "armed response"). Probably you will be the first ones to discover the screenshots from the game - it is in fact an exclusive.

GBR feels right at home - is it a Russian truck under the crane?

This is of course work in progress, as you can observe (no commands on the menu yet, lots of debugging info, minor glitches), but I have to say I was positively impressed by the overall quality of what I was shown, especially taking into account the number of people working on it. It was also very interesting to see how the features developed for current project are already being considered for application in future titles.

I really hope that OpenOko will survive on the market and continue to deliver new titles, each next one better than the previous ones. Good luck, guys!

On R-Type and clones

I think everybody knows R-Type, right?
(If not, feel free to check it on Wiki.)

I came in contact with the game on my faithful ZX Spectrum and damn if it wasn't one of my favourite shoot'em-ups back then. You can see it in its primitive galore in the movie below :

Indeed, looks like quite some time has passed since then. A whole saga was told, the last episode suggesting the end of it (R-Type Final).

I started reminiscing about R-Type, however, because (in contradiction with the aforementioned title) there seems to be a sequel of sort in development for the PSP. The strange thing is that it is actually going to be a strategy game (!) - I am having hard time imagining this, but hey, I've seen weirder things.


But that's not all, folks.


While still on the subject of R-Type, I would like to present a homebrew PSP game, called R-Gear, that is a tribute to R-Type. The graphics were redone, the music is totally new and the overall atmosphere is very retro 16-bit-ish. I know how silly it sounds, but if you download the game (for example from here) and give it a try, you'll see some obvious influences of Amiga demoscene.


I have to say that this is one of the best homebrew games on PSP, very playable, very stylish, very old-school and very hard. The only downside to it is that it won't run on my custom firmware 3.40OE...