Comic-Con 2K8: Will Wright loves me

Posted by Gary Hodges at 11:43 PM Jul 24, 2008

Fine you cowards, I’ll be the bad guy and say what no one else has the balls to:

Honey, no. Just no.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way…

Day one of the Con is behind me, and my feet are nearly destroyed. All day was spent either walking or standing in line, with only a few points where I got to sit down. But it’s been a blast, and I’m still struck by what a large presence gaming has at the show this year. For example, you can’t go anywhere on the floor without seeing people carrying the Little Big Planet tote bags Sony is apparently handing out – everywhere I look, a canvas ragdoll is staring back at me. At Comic-Con. Weird.

Speaking of Little Big Planet: I decided today to actually attempt to give a damn about Little Big Planet, or at least make an honest effort to see what the fuss is. The problem is that LBP is the latest game the gaming hype/PR/media machine has deemed One We Must All Care About, though I’m not really sure why. And frankly, games we’re told We Must Care About are almost always games we would’ve rightly ignored if not for their multimillion-dollar marketing budgets.

Maybe I’m just sick of Sony’s boy who cried wolf routine. Over the past few years, they’ve asked me to care about the PS3, Resistance: FOM, Heavenly Sword, Lair, Haze, and Metal Gear Solid 4… none of which lived up to the PR machine’s promises. And though Home isn’t out yet, I can already tell it’s not going to be even vaguely interesting to me.

But LBP seems different, at least in the way people talk about it. So when I get home, I’m going to reexamine all this LBP media and try to figure out if I actually need to pay attention to this game.

Will Wright

First on the to-do list today was to make sure I got a seat in Will Wright’s Spore presentation – so I was there bright and early, front row center, prime seating. In fact, Wright sat only three seats down from me as he waited to be introduced.

This was Wright’s first appearance at Comic-Con, but it was similar to talks he's given at past E3s. He speaks quickly, and presents material (typically, his influences and thoughts about game design) in an almost professorial way, albeit cleverly and humorously.

His “lecture” was sprawling in terms of topics: within an hour, he went from Kubrick’s 2001 to Gilligan’s Island (as a spiritual predecessor to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman) to a concise history of the Nazi’s V2 rocket program – somehow, somewhere, relating it all to his latest game, Spore.

Seeing Spore in its near-final state makes Wright’s wide-ranging speech seem almost mundane. The game is almost incomprehensibly complex, and yet – at least with Wright at the controls – somehow comprehensible anyway (much like his lecture). Skipping the creature creator entirely, Wright instead showed off Spore at a later stage: a planet covered in cities, the focus being to deal with rival cultures in whatever way you see fit. Wright explained a nearby culture was highly religious, so he sent an advertising robot to the rival nation “to attempt to convert them to materialism”. Wright also showed off various city management and trade windows, making this aspect of Spore to resemble, by his own description, SimCity and Civilization combined.

Later Wright took to the stars, building an interstellar craft through a system almost identical to Spore’s creature creator, all to procedurally generated music that’s unique to your game. Clearly, the essence of Spore is customization, and a unique, completely individualized experience at every step of the way.

As impressive as it all it, questions beg to be asked. Where is the balance of form versus function in these player-designed creations? Does any design have a chance to be successful in Spore? If the answer is no, then are there a comparatively limited number of functional, successful designs in Spore? But if the answer is "yes, every design can work in the game," then how does Spore manage to keep all the player customization from being purely cosmetic? I was ready to ask Wright about this “form vs. function problem” when he let the audience decide whether they’d like a Q&A session or a short talk about the Russian space program… and inexplicably, the crowd voted for the rocket talk.

Oh, and Will Wright was speaking only a few dozen feet from me. I didn’t even have to zoom my camera in for most my shots.

But then, only 10 minutes in or so, something strange happened. Wright noticed me, and stared at me, lecturing precisely to me the entire remainder of the presentation.

I admit, I could feel his genius. And his tenderness.

Street Fighter IV

Regular readers know I think of myself as a pretty good Street Fighter player, and a pretty huge Street Fighter fan. So there was no way I was going to miss a chance to play SFIV, as well as attend a presentation by the game’s producer.

There are ten SFIV arcade units at the show, and according to Ono, these are the final arcade builds, 100% complete. The units are up on a sort of boxing ring, with Capcom staff only letting a few up at a time, and then only allowing people about three minutes once they were on the platform. So you had to get to fighting, quick.
As you waited your turn, a staff member handed out red headbands with the game’s logo on them.

I thanked him and began to pocket it.

“You’re not going to put it on?” he guffawed.

“Ummm… well… no?”

“Where’s your fighting spirit?” he challenged. I tied on my headband.

Also note the official swag button.

All the arcade units were networked to each other, so you had a whole machine to yourself when fighting another player. Having never played SFIV before, I wanted to pick a character I knew inside and out so I could quickly perceive the little differences in the game: Ryu. Classic, pure, technical.

The headband helped, my opponent was humiliated. The game applauded my efforts, giving me an A in offense. Time for one more match, I picked an old high school favorite, Blanka.

Sloppier, but still a blowout. Still got it.

By comparison, the SFIV conference was a snoozer. Despite Ono’s enthusiasm and cheerfulness, the majority of the hour was spent merely replaying trailers most gamers have already seen, then announcing information about the game we’ve known for even longer (e.g., it’s more a sequel to SFII than III, 2D gameplay with 3D graphics, all the SFII cast returns, etc.). The only new news was a very strong hint that both Sheng Long and Cammy will appear in the home versions - not especially surprising.

It was very routine, and a bit disappointing. I cringed with sympathetic embarrassment at one point when Ono asked the mostly silent crowd – through his interpreter – if we liked what we were hearing, and to clap if we did because the deafening quiet was making him nervous. The crowd mercifully applauded and cheered, but only as a show of appreciation and excitement for the game in general… not the warmed-over “news”.

Can’t write anymore, tired. One last thing: all five button sets were claimed, so that e-mail “contest” is over. But there are lots of buttons left, thus there’ll be lots of ways to get some in the future.

Tomorrow: Sam & Max, Konami, and maybe some boobies.