SOKAY PLAY 3

THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 2011
FROM LIKE 8PM – MIDNIGHT

During the Downtown LA Art Walk

@ The Medallion
334 S. Main St Unit#334-5012
Los Angeles, 90013

Here’s a walkthrough from out last show…

This time I managed to set up the night before.

A Sokay Play flyer in the Urban Noodle window.

 Some peeps checkin out LUV Tank. We used our projector this time since we got a feel for how the setup would be.

Here’s David (who worked on LUV Tank and is working on Donut Get! as an animator), his girlfriend, and a hippie chick from the gallery next door! haha

Me and David.

Fellow gallery artist Kevin Jackson did a portrait of me showing the Thugjacker.

Thursday, December 8th, from like 8pm-Midnight.

Come cheggit out!

Peace.

-Bryson

Some strangers giving the game a shot!

My Urban Noodle dinner on the table, along with some empty wine cups. haha!

Brian is legitimately excited to be playing LUV Tank. Haha!

Time to clean up! Rebekah starts taking down her stuff.

Chris and John discussing music theory, on the subject of Chris’ “Robot Music” blog posts

The galleries are calling it a night!

I’m grateful that I had a lot of friends show up and got the opportunity to discuss the games one on one with a lot of people. We’ve actually got another show coming up soon on December 8th! Same place, I’ll have the flyer ready soon.

Peace!

-Bryson

For more info on the Reality Prevention Consortium event, check out its Facebook Event page.

A Downtown Los Angeles WC ad wants to put us out of business! Nature is the largest competitor of the Video Game Industry.

Here are some folks crowding around Skulls of the Shogun. I didn’t get a chance to play it but will probably play it on Xbox 360 soon enough.

Here’s the StarDrone station, swingy game for PSN.

Deepak Fights Robots. I heard this described as “Bubble Bobble meets Bollywood.” Didn’t play but it looked fun. Looked like single room puzzles where you have to find the correct way to defeat or avoid evil robots.

The crew, David Rodriguez and Chris Rock. Minhua’s head in the bottom right corner, haha.

The kissing game. She tried hard to convince us to play and for me to affix metal diodes to my tongue with fixodent to play a cheesy racing game. Cute idea but… PASS!!

Game debate about “Ethics in Games,” apparently hosted by a few unethical greedy game designers, haha. Some interesting stuff came up but it was mostly just pushing agendas and no clear ideas were really communicating. A shame tbat some of these people are representing the industry.

David must be taking notes… nah, just drawing some shiet! haha

The next day, we were chilling and trying to play the game card game that plays like a broken version of Apples to Apples. Not fun but it can spur conversation. In this photo Gus gets harassed by “Talks in Circles” man.

Giving out Indiecade awards.

Time to Peace Out! Gus Amador, myself (Bryson Whiteman), Escape Goat and Soul Caster creator Ian Stocker, and his homie James!

The Indiecade game festival is going on this weekend in Los Angeles, California! It takes place October 8-9. We didn’t even bother to submit anything this year due to a complete lack of response that we received last year. The show does make for a good environment to meet up with other developers and see what interesting things are going on.

Looking forward to it!

I’m a huge fan of Xenogears and I’ve heard that this game is one of the best RPGs in recent years. Something with that JRPG feel that you know and love. So far so good, the game hooked me from the start with it’s intro setting up the conflict and letting you explore a world living on top of giant robots.

The game focuses a lot on exploration, you get experience by traveling to new area and discovering landmarks. The flow of the game is super quick — it even lets you transport to any landmark you’ve been before at just about any time.

Battle system’s a realtime-menu based one — those are all of the rage these days. I’m not amazed by it yet, but it’s easy to understand from the get-go.

Here is an example of how the battle system plays out…

My time’s been split with Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo 3DS.

I wanted to get a 3DS when it came out. Beyond it being expensive, I managed to convince myself not to get one because there wasn’t even anything I wanted to play on it. But I played Zelda at Target for about 3 seconds and I knew I had to buy one. I waited a few more weeks and the price dropped.

Words can’t explain how amazing this game is. Each part has such intricate attention to detail, I can’t think of many games that compare to it. The 3D looks great but you sorta get used to it after a while. But it’s the graphical overhaul that really makes it worthwhile. Higher resolution textures, new models (Link has fingers now), better character animation. But they didn’t mess with the timing of anything, feels exactly the same. The controls are annoying sometimes — partially because it’s an old game and partially because of the 3DS stick.

I want Nintendo to make another game on par with this!

I’ve also been playing some Final Fantasy 13 on PS3.

It’s by far the most consistently beautiful game I’ve ever played. It got a lot of flack for its linearity and how the first 10 hours of the game are basically tutorials for the battle system — but I believe it got a lot more criticism than it deserved. It was questionable that they hold your hand through so much of the earlier battles. They reveal features of the battle system slowly, and it’s easy to win by just tapping X as fast a possible. But once you start to get an understanding of the whole system, it’s very awesome. Story does seem pretty lame though, unfortunately. Everything else is top notch.

I like that it’s very easy to pick up and play. The linearity does help me jump in and play 30 minutes before I go to work or some other times like that. Not having to remember which quest I was on the last time I played it helps me come back to it and progress speedily.

It’s interesting how these RPGs are streamlining gameplay to make them more accessible to their aging audience. The last RPG I finished was The Lost Odyssey and that was very old school, which I liked, but made it so that you had to dedicate yourself to it (2 hour long dungeons with few save points) to move forward.

Next step… get it into the game!

If you don’t know about Donut Get!, check out the teaser trailer in an earlier post. More info at Donutget.com!

I just beat Cave Story. It was the best game I’ve played in a while.

Being “late to the party” is even an adequate enough way of putting it. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to finally play this game, in spite of all of the great things I’ve heard about it. And read about it. Even on this very blog, Chris’ post on it in 2007.

Cave Story was an freeware hit from 2004. The game was created by a 1-man army. It has recently been released on Wii Ware by Nicalis, and a 3DS version is on its way. Inspired by reading a great interview with the creator, Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya,  decided to play through it during this 3-day weekend.

Christian Nutt conducted a great interview with Pixel on Gamasutra, giving some insight to his motivations and process he went through to make the game. I felt the passion in the words and knew that I had to finally see what the game was about. In the interview, Christian mentions that he feels that the “indie game movement” began with Cave Story. And playing the game, I totally feel that. Most indie games I’ve seen have has this same kind of retro style, visually and aurally. I don’t think there were even many games in the 16-bit era that used a style like this — to me they were trying to get as far away from 8-bit as possible.

One reason I had been putting it off was that I didn’t think there was a Mac version. There was a Mac version done before I even heard of the game. So I didn’t have to jump through hoops to finish.

I don’t know what more to say. The game feels amazing. It’s like Metroid, but it’s got a charm to it that’s reminiscent of games like Earthbound. The game’s got an incredible sense of exploration, it grabbed me, had me anticipating what would happen next. The game also plays like an action shooter, think something like Metal Slug or Gunstar Heroes. The action-packed boss battles definitely kept me on my toes.

If you haven’t played it, download the original Freeware version. Buy it on Wii-Ware or get the 3DS version coming out this fall.

-Bryson

Links:

• Gamasutra Interview: The Solitary Creativity of Pixel