Legends of the Hidden Temple, the greatest children's game show about video games ever created

If you were a middle-class adolescent growing up in America in the 1990s, you probably had cable television -- and if you liked games, you probably watched episodes of "Legends of the Hidden Temple" on Nickelodeon.

It was the greatest children's game show ever. And it was all about platformer level design.

Lesser game shows, like the regrettable "Nick Arcade," directly referenced video games with a predictably bland execution / green screen foolishness. Boooring. (Although this clip is pretty funny.) In contrast, Legends leveraged the genre of children's game shows to make something special. It didn't try to be anything else.

Legends had it all: a relatively unique (and now, hilarious) narrative that glorified cultural imperialism, frustrating in-game tragedies that made you yell at the screen, the real-world fidelity of good set design -- and perhaps most memorably, the excellent pacing that led up to the climactic "Temple Run" at the end of each episode...

... For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying - what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

"But I do not know," said Peter Walsh, "what I feel."

"tedium" by Eddie Cameron

Eddie Cameron's "art mod" is out. Didn't everyone get the memo? We're calling them alt mods now! Anyway, don't let the (self-deprecating?) name dissuade you -- it's actually quite interesting. Download it @ ModDB (reg. req.) or Filefront (which sadly no one's used, in favor of ModDB. I think it's sad and lonely. No reg req.)

My (mostly) spoiler-free opinion is after the jump...

IGF 2011

Stay tuned.

(Radiator 1-3 is NOT canceled... right now it's just huge, complicated and unwieldy. Game dev is never smooth, folks; it's rough, like your lover's stubble.)

MUSIC: The Bird and the Bee - Psycho Killer (only exists as an okay-ish quality YouTube video, no studio recording exists)

Levels to Look Out For (November)

These are levels (or environmental art pieces), often WIP but not always, that I really liked -- and you should like them too.

» Polycount Sidescroller Beat 'Em Up Contest
I'm kind of cheating here as all the entries are already finished, but seriously... Look at all these entries. Whoa. There's some really technically accomplished stuff here, like a wartorn research lab by Vincent "ParoXum" Mayeur, as well as a futuristic catwalk with a really strong color palette by Zach Fowler -- but my vote went to the stylized fishing pier scene by Nate "Skeptical Nate" Broach and Loren "Keen" Broach. I think non-photorealistic styles are often much more difficult to pull off, as I mentioned last month with the TF2 moon level, but this flat style really knocked it out of the park for me. Really great use of texture space, smart balance of details, and a very readable environment that would be really functional for an actual game (the floor and background are very distinctive, crucial for side scrollers).

» Aladdin: The Fate of Agrabah by Eric Chadwick
Eric Chadwick did art direction for this 1996 PC game based on the Disney film. (Okay, so this is really really old. Whatever.) But classic design remains classic design; I could see this easily being an AAA iPhone game or Unity game today. So many technical constraints (limited texture memory, no lighting methods) but so many great solutions (the way they did the painted lighting, smart use of sprite imposters). Make sure you watch the flythrough, especially at the end -- including Mirror's Edge, so few games have the balls to use so much off-white in their environments... He's kinda right though. The city looks like Doritos.

Sun(Wednes)day Papers (October 27th)

Yeah, it's not Sunday yet. Oh well. And these aren't really timely, or specific articles in general, but they're all related to design so I'll post them anyway.

» (edit:) Emily Short's critique of the casual game "Mr. Right" is game design analysis and close reading at its best: “I played this game in a haze of loathing.”

- If you have an interest in architecture, you gotta read "Small at Large." It's kind of anti-BLDGBLOG, anti-design establishment -- not so into urban design as into a very specific kind of architecture and how this (rather old, now) architect was scorned at the time. There's plenty of juicy personal drama, anecdotes about how famous st-architects are divas, and lots of concrete thoughts on the practice of architecture that are kind of refreshing from the usual cloud-gazing of the popular urban design blogs today. AND THE ALL-CAPS IS POSITIVELY CHARMING.

- Some of the other essays are good, but I read the first issue of "Journal 3" mostly for the interview with Molleindustria -- probably the best designer working in the "political games" genre today, with the best articulated design philosophy and great games to boot.

- I was asked what I thought about "Super Columbine Massacre RPG", specifically the creator's statement on the power of games. I had never played the game or followed the critical reception, but now I've played it (admittedly for 5 minutes because I found the basic design so awful) and read Danny Ledonne's statement and I'm conflicted. He seems to say things that I'd agree with... but they're coming out wrong. He's more interested in creating a dialogue than a playable game. Which is fine. But I think instrumentalizing video games so blatantly, so vulgarly as tools to an end -- that's a betrayal of art. That's why Ledonne's not a game designer; rather, he's a filmmaker who made a game, which is fine, but I don't want him speaking for me.

- Lost Garden has a post about "Triple Town" for the Amazon Kindle... wait, I didn't even know you could make games for the Kindle. Whaaaa?!

- Being at Parsons, I feel like I should be benefiting from the fashion design influence around here. But what can game design possibly learn from fashion design? I keep staring at Alexander McQueen's (supposed) last dress, some essence of godliness, waiting for some epiphany. Look at those folds, the draping, the creases, the cut, the sheen!... Maybe more fashion designers should work in the game industry so they can prevent the trainwrecks that are Final Fantasy character costumes?...

Call of the Fireflies

As featured in "Levels to Look Out For" for October, Clement Melendez's "Call of the Fireflies" single player mod for Crysis is out. If you're in the 0.0001% of the gaming community that happens to have Crysis installed, go play it.



... Or, if you're like the rest some of us who'll probably never play this amazing-looking level, just watch the video above and read his design notes. (Though on reading it, I feel like he could've pushed the puzzle design more with that hot / cold mechanic and left out the other stuff.)

Wave(s) of Mutilation: a proposal for a game about games

I presented this entire stack in-class in 2 minutes, so imagine me talking really fast and spending about 10 seconds on each slide. In my view, it's both an extension and better formulated version of my "Philosophy of Game Design" series. It'll probably be a Half-Life 2 mod, coming December 2010.

Wave(s) of Mutilation

I'm not proposing this as dogma. Many games use many different lenses.

BUT we can look at the philosophy of education to help us design educational games, or we can look at Marxist aesthetics to help us design satirical games, or we can look at unreadable Poststructural stuff to help us design games as formal rhetoric, etc.