It started with the following link was thrown out at the internal Facebook-page for the Game students at ITU: http://videogamena.me/

As fate would have it, people started posting their favorite hilarious names. Lots of likes and – at least from my part – local giggles and burst-laughs was done. Then, it took a turn, when the idea of having a Game Jam was added, with making up a game based on what the generator spat out.

However, in the end, just when I tweeted the link, I figured a very simple – yet rather hilarious – game could be made from it. The rules are quite simple:

First, gather a few people that wants to play. Not too few, not too many (4-6 would probably be perfect).

The following is then needed:

• A device that can display the Video Game Name Generator.
• A block of paper and a writing device, per player.

A person activates the VGNG, and the resulting name is spoken to the crowd. Each player now has a maximum of 5 minutes to come up with the best game-idea, based purely on the name. The winner is judged by social voting amongst the players. Naturally, you’re not allowed to vote for your own game.

Looking forward to seeing if the idea actually holds. At the very least, I’m going to see what it’ll turn to!

Awesome, yet bad idea: Get Sylar to playtest your game. No matter what, he’ll always know how it works.

See, the joke is – like many other jokes – requires some background knowledge, which at this point is two-fold: “Who/what the hell is Sylar?” and “Why would it be a bad idea?” The latter is probably the less important, but it still adds some depth to it all.

Most people will get the Sylar-part, as many have seen him, Zachary Quinto, in the role of Gabriel Gray, in the Heroes series. The series is basically about various people who gets super powers through the genetic evolution of the human race. Sylar’s super-power is simple – he knows how things work. I guess that’s a given from the tweet itself, but that’s how that is it. Unfortunately, he’s also the perfect super-villain, as he spent that knowledge for his own benefits, and was always scheming on how to achieve more power.

If we ignore the parts of him killing every single one of us to achieve the knowledge we have, being a fictional character, as well as stealing our super-powers, wha- . Yes, super-powers. I have some, you might not, but some of us have them. Carry on, it’s OK, we can’t all be super heroes after all.

Now, disregarding all those bad things, why would it be bad to have a person who knows everything play-testing your game? Obvious – he knows how it works. The best testers is those that tries the product for the first time, and then tries to figure out how the game works, and slowly learns it – as it was intended in the first place. Not only that, but all the little quirks would be hidden until they got told or finds out by accident. Sylar? He would simply know it – even the secret moves that the programmers added in, but didn’t officially finish yet.

After all, the process of game-testing is about figuring out what’s wrong in the game, what can be made better – not playing a game you already know all the little details about. The fitting quote here, is from Samuel Beckett, heard during today’s Game Design lecture:

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

I guess that’s also why jokes should never really be explained. Unless it wasn’t really a joke, but simply truth in compressed form – and thus, “it’s funny, because it’s true” applies. Success!

Many moons have passed since the raiders went to war.
Onwards and upwards, bigger weapons than before.
Magmaw took cover, he shivered on patrol.
The arms race crazy, simply way out of control.

Then Nefarian threw them, his latest devices.
Twofoot went and got them, following the advice – ‘What the…?’
Their tails were split, and their energy lost.
How many more will this dreaded war cost?

Then came the enrage, and constructs tumbling down.
If the fire got to someone, you’d probably frown.
But the raiders battled on, through hunger and pain.
Living to fight, just to victor again.

And now it’s the curtain call, the final onslaught,
no better epic could you possibly have bought.
But spare a thought for Magmaw and with it his friends.
So fight with their honour, and fight until the end.

Granted, it’s probably a lot more fun if you have actually tried the encounter. It might also help to add that “Twofoot” was the primary person dealing with the parasites.

My example of showing this, is the game “Piranha”. I found it ages ago on one of those random Demo-discs, that had shareware versions of a few different games. I can’t even remember where I got the CD from – I just have it. And it is – most likely – only because of Piranha.

The Piranha title screen

The sad thing? There’s absolutely no sign the game ever actually existed. A search of “Piranha” gives… well, I guess you can figure that one out, if I say that the amount of helpful links is less than the number already mentioned in the sentence.

But, what is known besides that? In every game, there’s usually a readme-file, an “About Us”, or a way to buy the full game. Heck, even a year would suffice. None of those are present. Zip. Nada. The only real clues are whoever developed the game: “OMT” and “D-DESIGNS”, and the fact that the creation-date of most of the files are somewhere in 1995. Sadly enough – and even sadder, that it was also expected – those names did not yield any useful results either.

The only remaining hint was the fact that the high score list had two entries, upon installing the game: “Delsion – GFX” and “Dzen – Coder”. As expected, neither of those gave any useful search results.

… then again, why am I even doing those searches? While it would be great to be able to get the full version of the game, in some possible way, the point of it all remains: It’s sad to see such a promising game would be forgotten, even though it might never even made it to release.

Luckily, I already got the most important part. The thing that made the game so incredibly awesome. Simply listen to the below, which I just recently recorded and uploaded to YouTube – only because it’s that great.

That is how epic all game music should be. Fittingly enough, the only others I remember, on top of my head, that makes as good music, is Epic Megagames, with games like Tyrian, One Must Fall 2097 and Jazz Jackrabbit, specifically. Oh yeah, and the Tristram-theme of Diablo.

Exam period is once again ravaging my mind (although, this time, my meta-algorithm seemed to go a lot better than last time). I havn’t gotten the grade yet, but I’m quite certain it’s near the top. Should be revealed in a week or so. On top of that, I’m in the middle of an intensive 3 weeks programming-project, which is quite entertaining, taking the hard work into consideration, as we just finished the “introduction”-week, and got to know the details of our main project, which is to be finished by the 25th.

World of Warcraft-wise, I had my first 1 month anniversary as a Wowhead Moderator. Some might have seen it in my Tweet-feed, but I thought I’d mention here as well, for good measure, as it has indeed affected how I spend my online-time. It feels great to be able to give something back to the community, by ensuring that the Forums are a nice place to discuss various stuff – and it has so far indeed been a pleasant experience to be a part of the team, and getting the experience in moderating.

On top of that, I’ve begun conquering the heroic content of Icecrown Citadel 25-man raiding, which is steadily progressing. I’ll probably also look a bit more into how the Shamans are looking for Cataclysm, when more information is showing itself. For now, my previous post still seems up to date, which can be combined with the newly released official talent calculator preview.

Lastly, I feel like reminding everyone that R.A.G.E wasn’t just an empty idea – I just don’t really get that many random ideas for crazy stuff to write nowadays, or the most immediate thoughts are published as Tweets, as they’re simply too short to deserve a post of their own (although I might do more of those semi-short ones). I do however want to get back to look more closely at the Diablo-universe, and continuing my theorizing about it, in different shapes or forms.

In essence, Rebirth isn’t really a fitting title, Reawakening probably covers it better – unless I’m mistaken for a phoenix made of lightning instead of fire… and not be a phoenix after all, but a gnu instead.