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You may or may not be aware, but last weekend a Pokémon tournament took place at several GameStop stores across the nation, mine included. I was seriously contemplating going and testing my mettle against the best my city had to offer, but unfortunately had to work (sudden schedule changes, the bane of my existence). Penny Arcade guy 'Gabe' was able to attend and his account is pretty telling. As the event approached, I was feeling a bit weird about going, and was pretty certain that if I did go, that I'd be the oldest one there by a pretty significant margin. I would have felt very strange knowing that I bought my first Pokémon game back in 1998, my sophomore year in college and the same year that some of these kids were born. So it's somewhat comforting to know that someone else shared this concern.

"As it turns out I was the oldest person in the tournament by roughly twenty years and the only one not wearing a shirt with Pikachu on it."

I've ended up purchasing a ridiculous amount of Pokémon things in the last decade. Since I've played games in the series for so long I sometimes forget that though the game is as deep as you want it to be, see EVs and IVs, it really is easy enough for the next generation of gamers to get in to. Gamers that don't know or care what the different natures mean or what moves compliment others in a double-battle situation, just which ones look neat.

My mom, as it happens, works as a photographer for many of the schools in the region. One day she produces a copy of Pokémon Fire Red that she found in some parking lot of some school. This game was pretty beat up, it had been run over at least once and was missing a chunk of plastic from the corner, but still worked. I looked around the save file on it and noticed a few things, primarily that the person that played the game was not 'Pro'. This might not mean much if you aren't versed in the game, but his wallet was empty, all of his TMs were gone, all of his items were gone, he had no pokéballs, and all of his pokémon had been taught all of the HM moves they could learn, whether they were useful or not. He had linked up with and battled 9 times and lost all but one of those times. But the thing is, the timer on the game had clocked more than 145 hours in the game. The person who owned the game, someone called BLAKE, had spent a significant amount of time with it, and played the game the way he wanted to, not the way that it must be played, if the voice of the internet is to be believed. I sometimes forget that for every player on a message board obsessed with crafting the optimal team with perfect stats, there are dozens that just play the game. Not to necessarily be the best, but to take their ragtag team and show it off to their friends.

I don't really know if I'd have made any significant progress in the tournament or even have made a respectable showing, but I do know that it was not for me. I am by no means 'Pro' at the game, and might well have lost, but contrary to what you may have been led to believe I would have felt pretty crummy if I managed to pound some little kids into oblivion.

Link! (Penny Arcade)

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Activision game designer James Portnow has an article up on Next-Gen where he explores the concept of fairness in games. Games, he argues, must be unfair in some way to make them engaging, which seems counterintuitive. The problem with generating unfairness is to make the game challenging without making it frustrating. Dissatisfaction, he reasons, is brought about by the frustration at being unable to overcome the unfairness, rather than the unfairness itself.

Let us again lay out the standard argument against making an unfair game, “making a game unfair makes it frustrating and a frustrating game is unfun!” In this sentence lies the key to our problem. If we examine this sentence closely we find that it is not the unfairness that makes a game unfun but rather the resultant frustration. Thus our great question becomes: can we make a game that’s unfair and yet not frustrating?

Then, he does almost a 180° turn and decries indiscriminate use of unfairness.

"Of course we’re talking about a dangerous subject here, playing with fairness is playing with fire. There is no easier way to sink your game than to make it unfair. In my studies on the topic I have found dozens of games ruined by unfairness and only a handful elevated by it...but the potential is undeniably there."

More inside.

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A while back I explored the phenomenon that some games are like some movies, and are so bad that they become good. Clive Thompson, perhaps reading my article, has recently explored this idea in his column, though he wasn't able to find any games that traversed the SaT.

The pleasure of B entertainment is pure, narcotic-level irony -- the peculiar joy that comes from seeing something that is trying to be good but failing on every level.

Bad games never produce this pleasure. Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children's show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it's just ... bad.

I'll concede that he may not have gone far enough back into gaming history. All of the games he played were relatively modern. Many games in the 8-bit heyday fit squarely into this pigeonhole. Games like Bad Dudes ("President Ronnie has been kidnapped by ninjas, are you a bad enough dude to rescue President Ronnie?"). They do exist, you just need to expend a bit more effort to find them.

EDIT: Whoops, almost forgot about the original Resident Evil.

Link! (Wired via Slashdot)

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I don't really understand how Game Daily has managed to stay afloat as long as it has. Its staff is exceptionally incompetent. That they've managed to become and continue to be a source of news and information for anyone is beyond me.

Case in point, their recent review of Pokémon Battle Revolution. While not a great game by anyone's standard, the review manages to get some key issues completely wrong which makes me wonder if Robert Workman even played the game he was reviewing.

More inside.