Far from the Madden Crowd

So, according to the US charts (cribbed from the excellent Wired Game | Life) Madden 10, as one might expect given the season in the US, did alright this month.  Not as well as last year's effort admittedly, but Mr Downturn has affected all titles in a similar way;  Madden did well enough to knock Wii Sports Resort off the top spot and currently that's enough to be considered "gangbusters".

1. Madden NFL 10 (Xbox 360, Electronic Arts): 928,000
2. Wii Sports Resort (Wii, Nintendo): 754,000
3. Madden NFL 10 (PS3, EA): 665,000
4. Batman: Arkham Asylum (360, Square Enix): 303,000
5. Batman: Arkham Asylum (PS3, Square Enix): 290,000
6. Madden NFL 10 (PS2, EA): 160,000
7. Dissidia Final Fantasy (PSP, Square Enix): 130,000
8. Wii Fit (Wii, Nintendo): 128,000
9. Mario Kart Wii (Wii, Nintendo): 120,000
10. Fossil Fighters (DS, Nintendo): 92,000

What's kind of interesting here is that the Wii version doesn't feature in the top ten at all.  For a franchise such  as Madden, you certainly expect the lead SKUs to be the HD consoles but EA have made a concerted effort with the Wii versions of late to appeal to a broader market - not making the top ten will likely be seen as a failure here.  In fact, considering that this time last year, EA were talking about how they've got a new strategy to succeed on the Wii, it's really not done well at all. 

So why?  After all, Nintendo have started to push more 'serious' products lately.  Both Cursed Mountain and the Wii SKU of Ashes Cricket have received reasonable TV advertising and have both charted in the top 10.  If we can get a cricket game into the top two during the height of cricket season in the UK, why can't EA get a Madden game into the top 10 during the height of football season?  


Control
Well, for one I guess there are some sports that are better suited to the Wii Remote than others.  Tennis and cricket are two sports that people might feel will be better represented on the Wii than on the PS3 or 360 due to the one-to-one association between remote, bat and racquet.  Tiger on the Wii is now arguably the lead SKU - the excellent Motion Plus controls have pushed it into a league of its own.  Madden makes fairly good use of the Wii Remote - it's an area EA are keen to get right - but with so much variety in gameplay (tactical selection/running/tackling/throwing) football as a sport seems better suited to the more complex controls afforded by a joypad.

The look
More than the controls though, I think the secret lies in the fact that Wii Madden no longer looks like a sim.  EA have given it the Grand Slam Tennis look.  Two months ago, I would have said this was the right move - keep the gameplay but lure in the kids and hope their parents play along too - but I've had a bit more time to think about it and I'm no longer sure it is.  Grand Slam Tennis did well.  It reviewed pretty well, it used Motion Plus reasonably well and, being released during Wimbledon, it sold well.  The choice to use 'fun' looking tennis stars allowed EA to make very crisp looking graphics and it's resulted in an overall level of polish that other Wii games have lacked.  However it would appear that in a world where football is boomed out on 1080p plasmas in shiny HD, dumbing things down rather than ramping things up runs the risk of alienating rather than attracting gamers.  It seems that tennis makes a good arcade game and football makes a good sim and what works for one won't necessarily work for the other.

What next?
It will be interesting to see where EA go with this.  They're committed to succeeding on the Wii and I've no doubt that they will.  Not being in the top 10 isn't going to be the end of the world for Madden on the Wii, but perhaps EA will start to focuss Wii resources on the titles that will shift units.

Sketchy

Okay, I clearly can't draw for SHIT but Odosketch is brilliant and should be checked out by all and sundry.

You've got the Power(Point)

Over the past year and a bit, I've been using PowerPoint more and more as a design tool.  It's obviously useful as a tool for creating pitches and the like - that's basically using it for its primary function - but there are other areas in which it can prove useful.  

Game Flow

In many ways, it's much better than Word for creating documents that convey a sense of flow - guiding someone through your design thoughts or a particular game path for example.  I've used it to go point-to-point through the first draft of a tutorial, I've used it to show the main flow through a front end, to illustrate paths through menus and to game out a couple of scenarios in a soccer design.

Drawing and ting

Not being the most skilled artist in the world has its disadvantages when you're creating documents that need to impress fickle publishers.  The obvious thing to do when creating docs that need to impress is to actually get an artist involved, but in mid-size studios where resources are always stretched that's not always practical.  PowerPoint does quite a neat line in vector drawing; there are loads of pre-set shapes, you can edit splines if you want to get really technical, you can add effects if you want to jazz things up.  It’s great for mocking up interfaces, doing flow diagrams, illustrating control systems and the like.  It never looks like final art - there’s just something a little too...middle management(?) about the whole thing - so there’s no danger of it ever being perceived as such, but likewise it’s better than some crappy Visio spread that never quite fits on a page.  

Fear of the Web

Okay, a couple of months out of date this but I was thinking about this remark that James Currier made a while ago in reference to the expanding casual games market:

"My money is on the web people to take the lion’s share of the gaming world by 2013 because I think it’s easier for us to learn the philosophies of game creation than it is for the gamers to learn the philosophies that make you successful on the web"

I appreciate that Currier is talking about the casual games web business, but something that's caught my eye in terms of casual gaming recently is the Nike+ website - the website for people who run with the Nike+ system.

If you don't know it, the Nike+ system is fairly smart in itself. Users purchase the Nike gizmo, stick it in their running shoe, hook it up to their iPod/Phone and do a run to their favourite music. Via technology that may as well be magic, the info about this run (speed, distance, er, other stuff) is logged on your iPod and you can use it to, you know, work out whether or not you're actually getting better at this running shit or not. Smart enough, but the website however, takes this to a whole new level.

Users (is this the point where I start to use the word 'gamer' instead of 'user'?) can join running clubs (clans) and compete either solo as a club against other Nike+ users. You get trophies for completing certain challenges (quests), you can create private and public challenges for people to enter (epic quests) and you can also compete in special group events organised by Nike. So that's what: progression, challenges, quests, high scores, clans, user generated content (buzz words!) - top it off with a blog per user and some forums and all in all, it's a bastard cross between PE lessons and Xbox Live.

Looks like the web people have worked out game design principles pretty well...

Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby

I spent some time today with Ruby on Rails - if you're interested, Instant Rails is a great way to get started and can be found here.  

It's pretty nice.  I've not really done much web development since I was at university.  It was hard work getting back into it but Ruby on Rails is a really smart system that really fits nicely with agile methodologies; it looksl like it's great for getting something up and running really quickly and then iterating on it.

Ironically, I'm thinking of using it to mess around with making a sort of Hansoft-lite as an exercise in learning the language, re-learning HTML/CSS etc. and learning whatever the hell Ajax is.  It should also serve to help me sort out a few "best practices" for agile development at work.

This probably ranks here: <-------0--> on the Fad-O-Meter.  I predict I get about as far as naming the project.

NB/ If you're interested in getting started with it, be careful of the out of date tutorials.  It would appear that RoR develops so quickly that most of the main tutorials (and books I guess...) are out of date.  A fellow Blogger.com chap has the best one I've found.

NNB/ Also this is useful info if you're dumb like me (and the guy who made the original post)

Time Team

So I'm still not convinced I actually want to do this blogging crap but I'm kind of bored at the moment so I'll keep it up for at least one more post.

Whilst watching a never-ending episode of Time Team this morning through a mild hangover, I decided that a game on the DS or iPhone that's based around excavating stuff would be pretty awesome.

It will need aliens in it to be properly sweet but if Indiana Jones can go down that route so can Tony Robinson.

A blog

A blog?  Do I want one of these?