Alexis Bauchu - On est pas des machines

Je vous ai déjà parlé de World of Goo dans un billet précédent, plutôt orienté économie, mais finalement je n'ai jamais parlé du jeu en lui même. World of Goo (WoG pour faire court) est un jeu de contruction / réfléxion sorti fin 2008 et développé par 2Dboy, un studio indépendant américain. Et par "studio", j'entends "juste deux talentueux ex-employés d'EA". Le but du jeu est de créer des tours et autres structures composées de petit êtres vivants appelés "balls of Goo" (intraduisible, mais imaginez une boule de pétrôle ou de morve dotée d'une paire d'yeux) afin d'atteindre un tuyau qui va aspirer les boules non utilisées. L'objectif étant d'atteindre le quota requis en fin de chaque niveau.

Dans mon esprit, WoG est, avec Braid, une icône du jeu vidéo indépendant, parce qu'il a prouvé au public que les "jeux de garage" pouvaient être de vraies réussites, à la fois critiques et financières. Le label "indé" en a gagné en crédibilité et la visibilté de cette catégorie de jeux a été améliorée. C'est un de mes coups de coeur de 2008. J'aime chaque élément du jeu: son gameplay de contruction avec ses pièges physiques; sa direction artistique étrange et attachante; sa bande son tantôt enjouée, tantôt mélancolique, tantôt épique; et son humour. Au delà de ça, en tant que développeur, je suis sensible à l'histoire du développement du jeu (un simple jeu expérimental devenu une production couronnée de succès), l'esprit de ses développeurs, etc.

Mais ce dont parlent rarement les test du jeu, c'est aussi les messages que le jeu véhicule, car derrière une façade de jeu cartoon plein d'humour, se cache en réalité une critique de notre société: les grands groupes qui écrasent leurs employés et leur concurence, la course à la beauté, la course au progrès, la main-mise des géants de l'informatique sur nos information personnelles... Beaucoup de thèmes sont ainsi abordés de manière indirecte, camouflés dans le décor ou dans le gameplay. C'est le sujet d'un dossier (en anglais) sur GameObserver.com appelé "We are World of Goo" (à lire ici). En voici quelques extraits:

Quand vous complètez le niveau “Hang Low”, la société "World of Goo" ouvre ses portes et on nous montre une vidéo de sa clientèle. Les clients ont tous le regard porté vers le nouveau bâtiment de la société et quand ils parlent, ils ne s'expriment pas avec des mots mais en poussant de petits cris aigus, à la manière de souris. Serait-ce la façon dont la société World of Goo, et que les entreprises du monde réel qu'elle représente, nous considèrent, comme des souris couinantes qui n'existent que pour consommer leurs produits?

Au début, l'idée d'utiliser la beauté comme source d'énergie pour alimenter le monde semble inspirée, jusqu'à ce qu'on se rende compte de quelle genre de beauté il s'agit. Le genre qui exclut certaines personnes pour le bénéfice d'autres, le genre pour lequel certains "moins chanceux" sont sacrifiés. Une beauté conservée seulement grâce à la chirurgie et aux injections; des visages qui perdent leur abilité à s'exprimer au nom de la "beauté".

Si vous ne connaissez pas le jeu ou si vous vous intéressez à la manière dont est construite le jeu, je recommande chaudement le visionnage de cette vidéo (encore en anglais, mais on peut activer les sous-titres) qui se concentre sur la manière dont le gameplay du jeu est présentée au joueur et comment l'aspect technique soutient ce gameplay.

I'd like to share with you some stats that 2D Boy published after the big sales they had for the 1 year birthday of World Of Goo (WoG for short). The point was that you had the choice in the price of the game, from 0.01$ to whatever you want. 2DBoy released the results of the first week of that event: they sold a lot of copies of the game, but most of them at 0.01$, which means 0$ because this all goes to PayPal for the transaction. So they tried again for another week and the game kept selling good but this time, at a much better average price, certainly due to people knowing that 2DBoy don't really get any money under a paid price of 1$.

But what I'd like to highlight, is the results per OS. It's a well know fact that if you wanna play games on a computer, you must have Windows, otherwise your choice is very poor (extremely poor on GNU / Linux). Developers and publishers don't care much about the other platforms and I bet they think the market is not big enough on these systems. But if you look at the market shares of WoG, you get a surprise:

During those two weeks, only 65% of copies of WoG were downloaded for Windows! This is far from being an undeniable domination of the market! GNU / Linux gets 17% of sold copies and Mac OS gets 18%. In these days where the iPod and the iPhone are real hits, Apple is regaining a fair number of shares of the desktop computer market, so the Mac score is quite understandable. But it's a bit more surprising for Linux. It seems obvious then that the fans of the penguin crave for games on their OS. It's easy to say that people don't play on Linux, when in fact there's just no game to play. So that's one myth busted. Note: last christmas, the guys from Wolfire got to the same conclusion and wrote a nice article about why developers should support Mac OS and Linux.

Another myth is that Linux users (and more generally open source fans) are cheap people, that they always want everything for nothing. Well guess what, here's the graph of the average price paid for WoG, per OS:

I say: myth busted

What system do you use? Do you play games on it?

A while back I said that I'd talk about what I do during my internship at Wizarbox. It was in April, so it's been 5 months. Ok ok, I'm late, but when I post, I like to be REALLY sure! Seriously, if I haven't talked much about it, it's simply because there's not much I'm allowed to say. Game developers (and even more the publishers) like secrets.

What I'm allowed to say for the moment is that I'm scripter on Gray Matter, the new and greatly expected game by Jane Jensen. If you don't know her, she's the one behind the classical Point-and-click game series Gabriel Knight. I'm in charge of integrating the backgrounds of the scenes, the dialogs, but mainly to create the script of the game, which means the interactions with the world, between the characters, with your inventory, and to create the animated cut-scenes.

Here's the official trailer (in german) presented at Gamescom 2009:

Recently I've tried the Resident Evil 5 (RE 5) demo. I'm a fan of the previous episodes. Not a HUGE fan, but I know the subject: I played to RE 1, 2, Code Veronica, Rebirth, 0, and RE 4. And I have to say that this 5th episode doesn't quite convince me...

What I like in the games prior to the 4th episode are the atmosphere, the strong feeling of vulnerability and the puzzles. Your avatar only had 4 health points and ammunitions were rare so you really had to avoid fighting, your inventory was quite small so you had to choose carefully what stuff you'd take with you (more health kits or more ammo?), your sense of orientation was challenged, that kind of stuff. Those ingredients created a new genre that can legitimely be called survival / horror. This all disappeared in RE 4 which flushed the frustrating camera and inventory away, but with it, many of the things that made the Resident Evil series what it was: out the evil company Umbrella, out the puzzles, out the zombies (the enemies are infected by a horrible parasite) and so on. To me, RE 4 was an excellent action game, but a terrible Resident Evil. Capcom certainly hoped to capitalize on the brand, but the idea is a bit weird: the gap with the first games is so important that old fans were disappointed and I guess that old haters were still repeled by the only sound of the name.

RE 5 is the direct descendant of RE 4: fast pace, hordes of infected, ammo and money popping out of dead bodies, camera located above the shoulder of the avatar. The new thing is that the hero is now followed in his mission by a sexy partner. And I think that there was many other places for improvement, but the devs blew it. The controls are horrible: while the game is loading, the key mapping is displayed on screen, but before you've read everything (or anything) the game starts. And it fails to tell you that you can use the cross to quickly switch weapons. Suddenly, your gun runs out of ammo, and you swear, trying to switch to your shotgun using the menu while the infected kiss you in the neck. You reload the level, this time you manage to keep the enemy at distance but eventually some big guy breaks in the house you were hinding in and smash your partner with a giant axe. Game over. AAArr!

Every time you restart, you come to a new sad realization: this big-manly-sweating character you control is obviously motor impaired because he can't fire a gun or reload or use his arm-long knife without his two feet stongly anchored in the ground. The two partners can't exchange a couple clips of ammo, instead they have to pass the whole stock, leaving the other one defenseless. The big guy with the big axe seems invincible and the mission ends only if you survive long enough, meaning you can run around the level and still win. In fact that the best way to stay alive. Doors can be kicked, but you can't close them (they automatically close after some time), you can't jump off a roof or even run (RUN!) without pressing a button... At this point, you're so frustrated that the coop mode is not able to save the experience. I remember thinking "this makes me wanna play Left 4 Dead right now".

To conclude, it took me at least 7 times to finish the first level of the demo. The true spirit of Resident Evil died with RE4, and now RE 5 is probably gonna kill a decent action gameplay with silly usability issues. The game is not out yet, but I'm not hopeful.

Just a thought like that: how much have you been playing lately? And to what type of game? I've been playing a lot of team fortress 2 this year and a bit of STALKER (Shadow of Tchernobyl). I've realized that every time I wanted to play Stalker, I wouldn't because the game is very involving. Not that you can't stop whenever you want, but that you're always in the middle of something, so you don't wanna leave the game, and because leaving the game would kill the atmosphere you've been immersed in. So I would rather play TF2 instead. Just for the comfort of knowing that I can switch off whenever I want. And paradoxically, I've been playing hundred of hours of this game, just because it is not involving!

It's exactly the same with TV series against movies. I've been watching tons of TV shows: How I met Your Mother, Chuck, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Futurama, Friends, House, etc, but meanwhile, didn't watch a lot of movies... What about you?

Left 4 Dead came out yesterday. And it's a great game! How could it fail? It has zombies (and not the kind of zombies you find in Resident Evil, no. More like those in 28 days later), great coop gameplay (we waited that for years!) , lightning fast engine, incredible animations, etc. I love it.

Some of my friends were disappointed they missed the prelaunch of the game, because they finally bought it, but didn't enjoy the pre-purchase discount. Well, they're gonna be even more sorry now, because Valve is now proposing a "left 4 Dead - Four pack" for 150$, so you can play with 3 friends. Meaning you get 25% off the original price, right after the game has been launched. Crazy!