Hi, I’m Niels ’t Hooft. This blog is (mostly) about game design and marketing.

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In the long-winding, quite insightful, but also a bit Nintendo-biased essay ‘Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy’ by Sean Malstrom there’s a phrase I really like: ‘non-fiction game’, for things like ‘Wii Fit’ and ‘Brain Training’, but also ‘Flight Simulator’ and ‘The Sims’. It’s so obvious that it should stick. 

According to LucasArts “the cart size of the DS makes it impossible to put out ports of any of our old graphic adventures.†Yeah, that’s because they’re only an inch in diameter, while your games used to come on these huge floppy disks, right? 

Justin Marks: “We don’t need Niko’s idiot cousin to tell us we’re about to be betrayed — in Portal, we actually act out the story as part of the gameplay.†Or as someone else wrote, but I forgot who: in games, we shouldn’t tell, we shouldn’t show, instead we should have the player do. 

“Why Japan didn’t create the iPod.†I’d guess because countries generally don’t create electronics appliances. According to this author, however, it all comes down to the language. Gives some insight into why consoles took off so incredibly in Japan. 

Maybe this is no news for you, but Todd Alcott has a refreshing perspective and puts it quite well: “‘Doom’ is a great game, but ‘Half-Life’ is a great narrative.†Even though Half-Life was released ten years ago, the sense that you’re really part of a story (and not just watching a story for a bit, then playing a game, then watching some story again) is still something few games evoke. Most recently, I felt it while playing Half-Life 2. 

This is something I’ve been wondering about: “Microsoft, somehow, is letting Sony keep fighting in the battle for second place even without exclusive killer apps. What happens when it has them?†The sales curve for Xbox 360 seems to have flattened for the last year or so, a sign that somehow it only appeals to a limited audience. Now that PlayStation 3 is picking up steam, that sales curve is going to be ripped to shreds. 

As Diablo3.com was recently acquired by developer Blizzard, a new ‘Diablo’ game could very well be coming up. No surprise there. What did surprise me is that the previous owner “being a loyal fan of Blizzard’s series, […] handed it over to Blizzard completely gratisâ€. One piece of advice: never donate your domain to a company that makes a billion a year. 

The Flemmish experimental game ‘The Graveyard’ is really interesting. I’m already in touch with the developers to do an interview and will hopefully write a newspaper article about it soon. 

I’m waiting for a second generation iPhone (it would also be nice if it were officially released here in The Netherlands). Hopefully, by that time, some of the great games that should be possible will have emerged. So far there’s one iPhone game I’d love to play: Trism.