London Gaming Con Event Details:

• Date: 3rd-4th Dec 2011
• Time: 11am – 1am
• Location: Rocket Complex, 166 Holloway Road, London. N7 8DB
• Tickets: Full day – £10. Evening only (after 5pm) – £5
• Event Planner: Available here
• Note: Over 18s only

You can also watch Tim’s last gig at the Sunrise Festival 2011 here. I hope to see some of you at London Gaming Con and at Tim’s gig on Saturday. I will be tweeting from the event so keep an eye on TheAvgGamer.

Here’s a gameplay trailer for OKABU from earlier this year. Adorable:

What? BAFTA Masterclass – Indie Game Development with Simon Oliver
When? 6:15pm, 7th December 2011
Where? Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
How much? £12 or less with concessions (book here)

Capcom Christmas Community Day

On Saturday 10th December we’re throwing open the doors and giving you the chance to play some of the up coming games from next year’s line up including Street Fighter x Tekken, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City and Asura’s Wrath!

More info here
When? Noon to 5pm, Satudday 10th December 2011
Where? The City Arts & Music Project, 70 – 74 City Rd, London, EC1Y 2BJ
How much? Free! (Register on the Capcom forums and then PM the UK community manager Fonix)

Richard Garriott – Tales of Fantasy and the Final Frontier

Richard’s passion for exploration has taken him from underwater explorations of the Titanic, to hunting meteors in Antarctica, each adventure giving him new stories to tell but also firmly rooted in exploring the significant science that can come from these activities. His life long dream to explore space drove him to create new ventures to make it possible, such as the X-Prize and Space Adventures Ltd. In 2008 Richard realized a lifelong dream by visiting the International Space Station.

More info here
When? 6:30PM, 14 December 2011
Where? ArtsTwo Lecture Theatre, Mile End Campus, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS
How much? Free! (But you have to book in advance)

Hear tracks from LA Noire performed live

Jazz FM will host a special evening at historic Grade II listed Cobden Private Club on Friday 2nd December with a unique performance by The Real Tuesday Weld, the musical minds behind songs sung by character Elsa Lichtman in the game and performed by real life German singer Claudia Brucken; (I Always Kill) The Things I Love, Guilty and Torched Song.

More info here
When? 9pm – 1am, 2nd December 2011
Where? Cobden Club, 170 Kensal Road, London, W10 5BN
How much? £10. (Buy tickets)

About a third of the ExPlay ’11 attendees signed up for the Plymouth Games Jam. Over a day and a half, they clustered in their groups to design and develop a game around the theme for the weekend. To prevent people from cheating by building things in advance, the theme was unveiled on the morning of the jam itself – Colour.

Each game was judged on 3 criteria: Innovation, Fun and Concept. A panel of four experienced games developers discussed each of the submissions and considered how original they were, potential for fun, final execution during the jam and how well the game related to the given theme.

“What ties it all together is whether there’s a theme to the game; a reason for things that are happening,” said Ed Fear, producer at Curve Studios and one of the judging panel. “Personally, I think is important to make games that are coherent. A lot of people like completely abstract games but if you just have somebody jumping around the environment it doesn’t make as much sense as, say, [gamejam entrant] ‘Pantene Pooch’ where it was a dog that was colour blind and you had to ‘Woof’ into the microphone in order to see colour. You could see the blocks that had been desaturated were now different colours, so you could see where to go. They made a character and they made a concept around the game. It’s especially amazing that they managed to do that in a day and a half.”

“Creating a joined-up bunch of mechanics is impressive enough. It becomes something more when you have a strong theme,” continued Andrew Smith, creator of Hard Lines. “It permeates every single element and yeah, these teams of two and three people managed that. There were maybe four or five that you could see being launched on Kongregate tomorrow and actually playable. I find it fascinating that we’ve got a point where you can “jam” like a music band, throwing ideas together and seeing what comes out in a really short period of time. It’s heartening for the future of our industry that the young people are coming up with such wonderful ideas. Genuinely. It sounds so corny but it is”

In consultation with the other two judges, Paul Taylor of Frozen Synapse fame and Ana Kronschnabl of Fluffy Logic, the overall winner of the Plymouth Game Jam was declared to be a Power-Rangers inspired game snazzily entitled “Team Ranger Team – Radiant Spectrum Rangers” Developed by Oliver Carson and Bradley Hartigan, these two have worked together on a number of small projects in the past and had the benefit of attending a previous game jam. The biggest thing they took away from that? You can’t think too big.

Hartigan said “There’s always a lot of things to do that you don’t really think about so you structure out your time thinking ‘Yeah, it’s all right, we can go to sleep now and do that in the morning.’ When we got up the next morning there really wasn’t time.” The final idea was actually one they had had kicking about for some time. “When we heard the theme was colour, we were really psyched. We finally get to do that Power Rangers idea.”

Carson added “Having giant robots is quite cool to a lot of people. We’re big fans of the old Power rangers series. We thought it was funny that they have all these dramatic poses and stuff so we wanted to make a beat-em-up where you basically just control the poses of the characters.”

Carson and Hartigan actually did upload their game to Kongregate the very next day. Sure, it’s a little rough around the edges but you can play its “Endless Battle” mode right now. Hop on over to try out the Plymouth ExPlay 11 Game Jam winner.

For those of you who want to know more about game jams, Jon Brady has recently published a book based on his weekend at the Global Game Jam in Scotland in January 2011

Entry to each session will be on a strictly first come, first served basis. Simply turn up on the day and hope you’ve arrived early enough to get in.

Beat ‘em ups to play at the event:

• Street Fighter X Tekken
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2
• Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade edition
• Tekken 6
• Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3
• SoulCalibur V
• Street Fighter 3rd Strike

Each session will also feature an 8 person, single-elimination tournament for Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Arcade and SoulCalibur V. There will be prizes for the tournament winners and some of the matches will be streamed live. You can also meet Harada-San, the creator of Tekken and watch some of the UK’s top players fighting it out in the exhibition matches.

There will be free bowling, pool, refreshments and free-play arcade machines on hand if you fancy a break from all the fighting games. Nice :-)

So who’s planning on coming along then?

Update 1st Dec 2011: Ono-San, producer of Tekken will now be joining Harada-San at this event and will be available for signing. If you can’t make the event you can watch via a livestream on http://www.twitch.tv/namcobandaiuk from 10am.

Activision will be streaming everything live on their COD MW3 Launch YouTube page or you can watch it right here:

Here’s the official teaser trailer for it:

Will be tweeting pictures and news live from the event, so don’t forget to follow The Average Gamer on Twitter.

Activision have also released a funny live action Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 video called The Vet and The n00b and starring Sam Worthington to amuse you before the game is released at the various midnight openings (GAME, Gamestation, ASDA and 150 HMVs) across the country.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is released on the 8th Nov 2011 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.

Andrew Smith, founder of Spilt Milk Studios, was at Eurogamer Expo for the first time to demonstrate Hard Lines, his iOS game, to the public. When working such a large event, it definitely is tempting to find out what else is going on but (un)fortunately Smith spent most of his time showing off his creation.

“I didn’t get to see much of it other than when I was trying to sell Hard Lines to queues of bored people waiting to play Battlefield 3 of get their grubby mitts on free OnLive consoles… but overall for indies it was ace! We’ve had so much feedback telling us how nice were all were, how cool the indie tunnel was (not literally, it was boiling!), and how fun it was playing so many different games and meeting the devs at the same time.”

Independent studios do not have the luxury of a full office of developers who continue working while the expo is running. This means that for every day Smith was on site there was no work happening on any of Spilt Milk Studios projects. It’s a risk, but was it worth it?

“It was the most tiring thing I’ve ever done, but by Krom it was worth it,” Smith told me. “I’ll do it every year if they’ll let me! Not just in terms of sales and support, but because of all the lovely people we got to meet!”

One of the most important parts of having a stand at an expo is to distinguish your company from all the others. While most major studios have a following of people who know the products, an expo can be make or break time for an independent. It’s all about getting more exposure with the general public. To do this you need to get the people in and looking at what you have produced. Larger studios will have flashy stands, lots of screens, booth girls and generally more freebies than you can carry but this is sadly not an option for most indie developers. Smith hit upon a unique solution; free cake!

“Yeah the free cake went down well, I heard rumours people over the other side of the expo hall had heard about us, purely because of the cake.”

Given the size of Eurogamer, this was no small feat, and actually lead to an impromptu competition to see who could get the best score on HardLines during the show. The only problem for Smith now is how to top it next time.

“Perhaps we’ll get some glamorous assistants too (dressed as cake?). Whatever we do it’ll be a bit of a gimmick but weirdly popular, I’ve no doubt about that. And if I ask anyone to dress up, I’ll be doing it too. That’s a promise.”

After the event was over, a few of us retired to a local pub to discuss the event. It was pretty clear that although everyone from the indie section was exhausted, it was definitely worth the effort and most people will be making the effort to showcase at future events.

As I went to take my seat in the auditorium I was handed a beautiful concert program. I’ve scanned the majority of it for you including the song list.

The program provided insights into each of the songs/medleys. Reading it made me realise just how many iconic songs the Legend of Zelda series has produced.

The evening featured a number of special guests. Eiji Aonuma, producer and director of the Zelda games since Ocarina of Time was the first surprise of the night. With the help of a translator he welcomed us to the concert and hoped we would have fun evening. The second surprise was Zelda Williams. The daughter of über Zelda fan Robin Williams was going to be our compare for the evening. She was clearly nervous addressing such a large audience but as the concert continued she relaxed and gave us an insight into what the games mean to her. Unsurprisingly, given her name, she’s a massive fan and plays them to escape from the stresses of life. A bit like the rest of us then.

As you can see from the scans of the program, the song list was brilliant. Almost every Zelda game was featured. The orchestra were just flawless in giving new life to music that was so familiar to the fans in the audience. The giant screen behind the orchestra showed gameplay, images and animations from the Zelda games to accompany the music. Seeing memorable moments from each of the games with the orchestra in full swing was an amazing experience. My favourite songs from the show were the Wind Waker symphonic movement and Hyrule Field theme from Ocarina of Time. I don’t think I’ll never get tired of hearing these pieces of music.

The biggest surprise of the night was saved until late in the evening when Koji Kondo, legendary Nintendo music composer appeared on stage to play Grandma’s theme from Wind Waker on the piano. As you can imagine the whole auditorium went nuts when he first stepped on-stage to thank us for supporting the Zelda games over the years. I think for many people this was the most memorable moment of the whole concert. Kudos to Nintendo for organising it.

Towards the end of the concert Aonuma reappeared to announce that a Zelda 25th anniversary symphony CD will be included with copies of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. So look out for later on this month when the game is released for the Wii.

A beautiful rendition of the title music to Skyward Sword wrapped up the concert. After hearing the entire song for the first time, I’ve no doubt it will be soon sitting alongside the classic tunes from Ocarina of Time as some of the best music from the Zelda games. After this fitting climax to a wonderful concert I left the auditorium clutching my concert program with decades of iconic Zelda tunes happily ensconced in my head.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword will be released on the 18th Nov 2011 on the Wii.

Main attractions:

• Lion’s Arch, Kamadan, Droknar’s Forge and Tomb of the Primeval Kings have all undergone Halloween makeovers
• New Halloween quests in Lion’s Arch and Kamadan
• Costume Brawl (PvP minigame)
• Every 3 hours from the 31st Oct 2011 Mad King Thorn will appear in Lion’s Arch and Kamadan

Mad King Thorn appearances:

• 31st Oct – 07:01
• 31st Oct – 10:01
• 31st Oct – 13:01
• 31st Oct – 16:01
• 31st Oct – 19:01
• 31st Oct – 22:01
• 1st Nov – 01:01
• 1st Nov – 04:01
• 1st Nov – 07:01

Note: All times GMT

If you participate in any of Mad King Thorn’s appearances you get a special Halloween mask. There are 2 different masks to collect. One from Lion’s Arch and the other from Kamadan so you’ll need to get yourself to both locations.

If you haven’t got Guild Wars yet then you can pick up the Guild Wars: The Complete Collection for just £14.99 (with no monthly fee).

The panelists were Rhianna Pratchett (Heavenly Sword, the Overlord series, Mirror’s Edge), Jim Swallow (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Killzone 2), Ed Stern (Brink, The Enemy Territory games) and it was chaired by industry veteran Andrew S. Walsh (X3:Reunion, Prince of Persia (2008), and Medieval II: Total War).

They started off by discussing the role of a character to help tell the story and the discussion outlined the two main approaches that games seem to take: either an empty vessel with no voice, or a pre-defined character such as Nico Bellic or Nathan Drake. Opinions differ upon the best approach for each game and the amount and method that “story” is delivered to the player. The panelists seemed to agree that even with a good compromise between the two (as in several of Valve’s titles), games have the unique challenge of straddling explanatory story and interactivity with player agency.

It was also mentioned that environment itself is often a character, namely because the designers and level builders are focusing so much time and effort on building the “sets” that will enclose and immerse the player and characters. Sometimes this is a good thing, as Rhianna Pratchett cited in the case of Bioshock’s Rapture, but to me it also means that each team has such a laser focus that it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. When watching a film, for example, the director or cinematographer decides where the camera goes and where it’s pointing. In games the player takes on this role, thereby potentially missing something important to the story.

Judging from the difficulty in finding adequate terms to describe the complex concepts that make up game design, we’re still struggling to find the right language for the medium. Ed Stern made an excellent point in that new mediums are often described in terms of the mediums that came before (as in the term “Horseless Carriage”). To my mind, we often define games in terms of their gameplay as well as their tone and theme, although the two are not always linked. Further complicating this is the fact that some of the most basic storytelling devices in non-interactive mediums, like a close-up shot of two characters chatting is more “expensive” in terms of development time than helicopters exploding or cameras flying through the air.

In addition to the simple hurdle of a medium trying to define itself, is the process itself, specifically the commercial and financial realities attached to the projects. The panelists described the process as something akin to a “school play”; you might have all the time in the world to craft something great, but you are very limited in terms of range with your actors, sets, props, etc. As writers, they have each written thousands of lines of dialogue, but even though the effort and resultant quality may have been significant, the tight deadlines and very little context given to actors can often pervert the original message. Ed Stern described motion capture actors that have provided incredibly passionate and nuanced performances, but when mapped to a body that’s of a different proportion, some of that complexity is inevitably going to be lost in translation. Beyond this is the larger question of the ultimate audience. Quite often the people pulling the purse strings on some of these very expensive budgets do not represent the audience as a whole, which explains why, as one of the panelists put it, the protagonists are all of a certain ethnic background, culture and identity.

Andrew S. Walsh also pointed out that the other mediums, such as film and television, still have many of the same challenges outlined above, but what was really sobering to me was the simple fact that writing and story are often such a minor consideration in the entire process of games today. The four panelists agreed that quite often they may be attached to a project very, very late in production, or are under such tight deadlines that the quality is not what it could be. It almost seems like writers are involved as an afterthought, which seems a bit ass-about-face to me. While the medium is primarily a visual one, I still believe that a strong literary vision, provided by someone who is adept at crafting a story and characters, is integral to telling a story of any kind or medium.

I want to try and avoid some of the binary thinking that pervades many discussions on the subject, however. Not every game has to have a supremely well-crafted story to be enjoyable, and for a large part the two can and should co-exist happily. But it’s important to remember that although one might have been commercially successful for the last ten years or so, there’s also room (and potential for more profit) in an increased complexity of content, and as gamers and consumers we should demand more of the stories presented to us in games.

In short, the discussion was enlightening, but also kind of a sobering one for someone who believes in the storytelling power of the medium.