I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Minter at the weekend. Jeff’s been responsible for some of my all-time favourite games, and his titles for iOS are by and large really great. (I’m particularly fond of Gridrunner, Minotron and Goat Up.) The article won’t be out for a while yet, but I thought I’d share a nugget of insight from Jeff, which struck a chord and is great advice for anyone in a creative industry:

Make the things you want to exist. That’s always been my prime motivation. Yes, I’ve wanted to make a living, but really I’ve wanted to make games I want to play. I think as long as you’re doing that, you’ll be happy and you’ll make good stuff.

Wired’s Ryan Rigney on Rovio. This is a very strange article, pretty much suggesting that Rovio has spent the last few years essentially iterating on its own version of Crush the Castle (which is fair enough), but seemingly ignoring the dozens of games the company made prior to Angry Birds. (What, you don’t fondly remember Sumea Ski Jump?) And then the company gets praise for Bad Piggies, which

doesn’t feel like anything else on the market

Bad Piggies is a good game, and it certainly avoids much of the randomness that I found utterly infuriating with Angry Birds after the initial excitement of flinging avians at ramshackle buildings wore off. But it’s not like build-your-own physics puzzlers are something new.

This isn’t a criticism of Rovio, however. For once, I actually have some faith in the company, purely on the basis that it has done something different to what it has been milking for years now. Also, the execution of Rovio’s new game is solid and impressive. But it is curious to see a lot of writers these days offering very abbreviated takes on the games industry.

I previously wrote about fragmentation of iOS games controllers, with the GameDock providing a different system from the somewhat popular iCade. Before that, I questioned the sanity in app-specific controllers, because it made no sense that someone would buy a controller for one game or set of games.

Duo had form in this, creating Atari Arcade, an Atari-branded controller specifically for the mediocre Atari’s Greatest Hits, which includes a bunch of arcade games that really only work with their original controllers that weren’t joystick-based. So Atari Arcade is not only more limited than the iCade, but a non-optimal experience with the only games it works with. Great.

Duo’s now announced Duo Gamer and Duo Pinball. Again, these appear to be specific to certain companies—the Gamer ” plays exclusively with top-rated Gameloft apps” and the Duo Pinball? Yup: “Duo Pinball works exclusively with the games from Gameprom listed on the website”. What’s most baffling about this isn’t that Duo has started from this position (iCade, remember, initially only worked with Atari’s compilation), but that the website FAQs appear to suggest it wishes to remain there:

I’m a developer; can I use the Duo Gamer for my game?
No, the Duo Gamer works exclusively with Gameloft games. If you’re interested in using a controller for your games please email controllerdev@discoverybaygames.com.

I’m a developer; can I use the Duo Pinball for my game?
No, the Duo Pinball works exclusively with Gameprom games. If you’re interested in using a controller for your games please email controllerdev@discoverybaygames.com.

So the aim appears to be “we will design a controller specifically for your games, rather than adding value to our existing products”. Perhaps I’m missing something, but this seems like a perfect way to send your hardware rapidly to the bargain bins, once people realise quite how limited it is. Still, perhaps the press will help out. After all, while not being thrilled with the Duo Pinball itself, Slide to Play said in its review:

Duo Pinball controller works with games from just one company, Gameprom, the makers of the best pinball games on the App Store

Well, I guess Pinball Arcade and Zen Pinball must be figments of my imagination. Lucky me.

Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo has published an interview with Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo. I’ve written quite a bit about Nintendo on this blog, and prior to the iPhone’s appearance, most of my gaming was on Nintendo handhelds. I particularly loved the DS, but I also own various Game Boys, and they all sit sadly unloved in a chest of drawers in my office.

Despite this, I’m not of the opinion Nintendo should throw in its lot with Apple and other third parties, effectively becoming another Sega—yet. This is because Nintendo still has the potential to out-Apple Apple in the gaming space, through making games and hardware. This, note, is what Apple proponents rightly say sets Apple apart from much of the competition—it makes devices and operating systems, and so can mesh those things together far better than other companies. But Apple doesn’t do this in gaming.

What Apple does do in gaming, however, is provide a number of lessons that I still believe Nintendo must learn from:

• More of an emphasis on digital downloads, with the immediacy and better value  those things can provide.
• A better way of dealing with indies—perhaps not quite a iOS-style free-for-all, but there must be a happy medium where bedroom coders are encouraged to bring further innovation to the platform.
• More linkage with the wider world, through the use of non-gaming apps. Again, Nintendo shouldn’t follow Apple in this regard—a Nintendo device doesn’t need a half-million apps. But it does need to keep the device in someone’s hands, so they don’t stray. So: stronger social, browsing and video apps are a must, for a start.

The main focus of a Nintendo device must remain games, but that shouldn’t be the only focus, otherwise Nintendo runs the risk of its devices becoming increasingly niche, which in itself is a danger in that such things will appeal to people with very specific demands. The success of Nintendo handhelds has often hinged on their accessible and widespread nature, not them only finding favour with the select few.

The Kotaku interview is interesting in that instead of being bullish—Nintendo’s tactic of the past—Iwata is seemingly very aware of the changes in the market and yet has a belief Nintendo can continue to succeed. Again, there’s evidence here from Apple’s history—when the products are good enough, the company has been massively profitable with a minority share. Nintendo therefore must ensure its products are good enough—’magical’, to use Apple’s rather naff terminology—and not merely OK.

One way of doing this is in creating unique experiences, argues Iwata:

I think that if we are able to provide experiences on handheld devices that consumers cannot get on another device, then we will continue creating software and hardware going forward…

Strong first-party games married with intuitive and preferably innovative control mechanisms are the way to do this. But Nintendo has of late too often wavered and retreated to its default position of “release the same hardware in different colours and at different sizes”, which leads to Iwata’s flip-side of the coin:

… and if it comes to a point when we’re not able to do that, I think, yeah, you will see portable handheld gaming devices go the way of the Dodo

Curiously, though, Iwata also isn’t blind to its rivals, nor seemingly scared by them, as the Kotaku piece notes:

The entirety of what you might need to know about how Satoru Iwata feels about the supposed threat of Apple and iOS gaming is that, during our interview last week, Iwata read 3DS sales figures to me off of a MacBook Air, which was plugged into a white iPhone, presumably his. When a gaming reporter goes to a showcase for, say, a Wii game or an Xbox game, Nintendo and Microsoft show their games on non-Sony TVs. They don’t let you see hardware from supposed rivals. But there was Iwata, sitting around the corner of a table from me, laptop flipped open, Apple icon presented toward me.

This to my mind shows a confidence in Nintendo’s products, and also an admission that other companies exist, and that their products are also worth using. Additionally, Totilo also got an interesting response from Iwata about the thorny issue of convergence:

[In] the day of the GBA our challenge was to provide experiences you could not have on a cellphone at that time. In the same way, we have to look at the Nintendo 3DS and other platforms in our future as being able to do the same thing in terms of what smartphones can provide as well.

However, Totilo makes a statement that’s almost a counterpoint and that rings very true:

[The interview] was eye-opening, because it did not conform with the critique from some quarters that Nintendo’s head is in the sand and that it does not appreciate the threat of cheap, downloadable iOS and Android games. But it was also short on specifics of how Nintendo would set itself apart in a world that seems more gaga over the next iPhone than over, say, the 3DS’ glass-free 3D.

This appears to be the challenge for Nintendo now: not in realising the market has changed, but responding to that. I’m going to be very interested to see what’s next from the company. Another DS with a gimmick is clearly not going to be enough. I wouldn’t be shocked to see the Game Boy brand back, but as a much stronger device in terms of being multifunctional, but also with innovations for gaming that no-one else had thought of. If not and we just get the 3DSMax-o-tron II, I think Nintendo could find itself in a much worse situation.

Still, even if the worst comes to the worst and Nintendo did have to do a Sega, imagine if its games ended up officially on iOS: Angry Birds would be ousted from the top of the charts by Mario and chums, probably forever. As a worse-case scenario, that’s not too bad a prospect, and you could bet even a gaming-ambivalent Apple would sit up and take notice if it got an email from Iwata mentioning that Nintendo’s games were soon coming to the iPhone and iPad.

Tap! magazine editor Christopher Phin has written about difficulty walls, and his frustration at being rubbish at games, thereby making his progress often resemble: Oh, this is quite nice. I’m having fun here, and I think th—SMACK. (We’ll ignore for a minute the super-secret that I’m about to reveal, in that Phin completed World of Goo HD in relatively little time and with no walkthrough assistance whatsoever, rather scuppering the ‘entirely rubbish at games’ thing, but anyway.)

Difficulty walls have long been a problem in gaming, and difficulty is extremely tricky to judge. Indies in particular have a hard time of it,  because they’ll regularly play their game and, naturally, get very good at it, and may ramp up the difficulty level accordingly. No worries, you might say, because good developers have chums and pals they can rope in for playtesting. Well, sure, but they regularly play the game and, naturally, get very good at it, and the developer may ramp up the difficulty level accordingly… Also, the opposite is sometimes true—devs get paranoid and the default (or, in bad cases, the only) difficulty level is set so low that you feel you could complete a level with your eyes shut and one hand tied behind your back, while being attacked by a mad person throwing inflatable geese at your head. Neither option is particularly fun for anyone. Apart from the geese.

In his article, Phin then argues Where’s My Water? has a kind of sawtooth curve, where each set of levels gets tougher until it’s complete; on starting a new set, the game eases off a bit. Long-time gamers will note that ebb-and-flow used to be quite common in gaming, especially in the arcades. Even those games that appeared relentless on the surface sometimes weren’t actually relentless at all if you were paying attention—instead, as a game hotted up, the odd easier level would be dropped in, enabling recovery. Eugene Jarvis once told me this was one of the main aspects of his game design, and it was why planet refreshes occurred in Defender after you’d carelessly allowed all the little guys under your protection to be horribly mutated by evil aliens:

It’s redemption, where if you can just survive a couple more waves, everything will be OK. Providing a difficulty curve, rather than a straight linear projection of progressive difficulty… instead, [Defender] has waves where it’s more and more difficult, and then—aah!—it’s easy for a little bit. You have this roller-coaster of emotions. “If I can just get through the next wave, I’ll be in paradise!”

It’s strange how few developers utilise this idea today, which can be beneficial for casual fare like Where’s My Water but also hardcore arcade gaming like Defender. I know Llamasoft‘s titles frequently use this technique, but so often developers think a straight line—easy to ‘really not very easy at all’—is the way to go, when variety in terms of difficulty can add spice and breathing space to games that often sorely need it.