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I was interested in the Bionic Commando XBLA remake, but the demo was just way too short for me to decide. It took me less than 10 minutes, and half of that was spent figuring out the innane interface on the little hacking minigame.

I’ve played through Braid, and I’ve been around a few other people playing it who don’t have their own 360.  Each time through the game, the music just gets more and more annoying. The music itself is fine, but the rewind music alteration just drives me insane. Especially when it’s back and forth in 1 second increments.

That’s the main complaint I have.

I finished Braid a few days ago, and I recommend buying it if you’ve got a 360. Like everyone else already told you. So if you haven’t bought it yet, I refer you to the Zero Punctuation Psychonauts review.  Just watch the first 45 seconds and follow the instructions.

I’m a fan of intelligent loot systems. I’m referring to any sort of loot system that has more to it than a simple dice roll. For example, the chance of getting a rare item can gradually increase with each opportunity until you’re guaranteed to get one.

A good intelligent loot system still allows players to get lucky loots, but it helps eliminate the bad luck streaks. It’ll also take groups into account. City of Heroes easily has the worst loot distribution of any MMO I’ve played… good thing loot isn’t very important in that game. I’d routinely play with the same group and have one of us completely overload on loot and constantly have to pass it off to the other members who’ve looted nothing.

The reason intelligent loot systems interest me is simple: they give us better control over the player’s experience. I want to provide a steady stream of fun and exciting events in a game, and loot is often a big part of that equation. If we leave it entirely up to chance, then we address the macro loot concerns but we ignore the micro - the individual player experience. It’s important to control what happens in the big picture, but it’s not something the average player thinks about when they react to a situation.

Controlling things behind the scenes is one form of intelligent loot system, but we can also provide them as tools for the players. I’ve been through a couple 5-mans in WoW where loot was distributed by dice, and one person won every single item. Guilds started creating their own loot structures to solve this problem long ago, but I haven’t seen a game provide that structure. It wouldn’t be hard to build gold kill points (GKP) into the game as an option. That would open it up to everyone in the game, and it wouldn’t require player trust to distribute loot. I’m not saying GKP is the answer - there are many different systems, but they are always player-driven.

Offhand, I can’t name any games that definitely used intelligent loot systems, although I believe I’ve played one or two.

Duncan Fyfe has an interesting article on education and games up on Gamasutra today. This quote stood out:

“It follows that we like learning best when we don’t think we’re doing it.”

Growing up, I learned tons of things from my hobbies that made school easy. I learned how to write by reading ‘fun’ books. I learned how to handle complex mathematical relationships by playing strategy games. I learned how to do quick computations playing stat-driven action games. I learned problem solving from all sorts of different games… and so on. And clearly, I learned a little bit of repetition too! ;p

The key points are: 1) I was just having fun and didn’t realize I was learning, 2) These were just regular activities that weren’t designed to educate.

I’m only really interested in education as it relates to general skills and concepts, while the article talks a lot about opinions.