Romain Guy's Blog

Façade, gaming redefined

I am what you would call a "gamer". I have been playing video games starting with the NES. Since then I owned many consoles and dozens of video games. My love for video games is due do the stories and the wonderful worlds game designers imagine for us. That's why even though I bought 4 consoles since I arrived in the US 7 months ago I am not a hard-core gamer. Once the story has been told, the game is over and I want to play at my own pace. I can spend weeks without playing and when I play, it cannot be more than a few hours a week and this makes me happy.

Beautiful? Booooring!

I should be thrilled by the recent release of the XBox 360 but I am not. I am, actually, sad. As the hardware becomes more and more complex, game developers need more and more time to create their games, most of the time for the sake of better graphics. I love good looking games but most of them don't entertain me anymore. And despite its incredible power the XBox 360 only offers me games I've played with millions of times before. I've always liked Nintendo's approach to gaming and I cannot thank them enough for what they are doing with the Nintendo DS and the Revolution: the hardware forces game developers to be creative, to bring us a new breed of video games. I don't want yet another Blizzard's RTS, another Madden NFL iteration, another boring FPS with dark hallways... I want more of ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, Wario Ware, Pac Pix, Meteos!

You mean I have to BLOW in my Nintendo DS to get rid of the clouds? Gimme that game!

Façade might just be what I was waiting for. This innovative game is in fact an AI based art/research experiment. Presented as a one-act drama, Façade first appears as crude-looking, very short game. Yet, thanks to 5 years of engineering, its authors managed to create a novel architecture which supports emotions, body language, facial expressions, natural language generation and parsing and a drama-managed plot.

The game doesn't even dictate you who you are. When launching the game you are asked to choose a name, and therefore your sex. You are then dropped in the game itself, a 3D world in which you interact through a first person point of view. The game starts at the front door of two of your friends, Trip and Grace, who invited you over for dinner. As the drama unfolds it becomes apparent their couple is having trouble and you are the witness of their unhappiness. What should you do? I can't tell. It's different every time you play the game. The characters react to your actions (you can comfort, hug and kiss them) and to your words (you can talk to them at anytime by simply typing something on your keyboard) so it's really up to you. You can try to help them the way you want. Or you can just sit tight and see what happens. There is no goal other than experiencing a good moment of what gaming could be.

Even though it's not graphically appealing, Façade is technically impressive in the way it parses the sentences you type. I also really enjoyed the generation of natural dialogues. Characters hesitate, interrupt each other and so on. It's not perfect but it's refreshing. Also the lips-syncing might no be very good but look at the facial expressions and the body language of Trip and Grace. After having seen bland and neutral states on characters faces in almost every 3D video game I played to, I'm thrilled.

So please, if you are on Windows, go to the official web site and download your free copy of the game. Some of you will love it, some will find it deeply boring but I doubt you will remain unconcerned about it.

Oh and I wouldn't worry too much if you are not on Windows and cannot play the game. After all, it's written in Java and OpenGL and the authors seem interested in any help to port the game to another OS (at least MacOS X).

Comments

• If you like story, I recently played No One Lives Forever and enjoyed the voice acting and story. It's still a 3D shooter with some unique puzzles, but the "character" of it was unique and enjoyable. I actually crept up on two NPC bad guys who started having a philosophical discussion on whether they were a product of their environment or not, and it lasted for around 5 whole minutes! I just sat there listening and shaking my head, because it was totally NOT in the usual shoot-em-up vein and I loved it. If you haven't played it, give it a try and set it to 'easy' and download a walkthough, just don't shoot or make yourself visible if you start hearing NPCs conversing, as it's fun to just listen to them. It's also fun because of all the 60's cliches it skewers, kind of like Austin Powers but in a less rude way.

  I too like story and have little time to play (hence my focus only on PC games), but I enjoy a lot of game types. It's fun when you get one with intriguing story, good voice acting, and interesting game play. That's part of why I'm a bargin-bin shopper, as I don't feel bad tossing a game if it only cost me $10, and I can usually look up reviews and get a consensus as to whether a game is worth trying or not.

  Posted by: gerryg on November 29, 2005 at 12:30 PM

• Ha! Interesting you should mention "No One Lives Forever". I just picked that one out of the bargain bin on PS2 for a Christmas Present. Hope that this version is as good as on the PC.

  The FPS games that really took my notice of late is the Splinter Cell series, which very effectively uses excellent AI and the new lighting technology of today's GPUs to create an immersive story-driven game experience with an extra dimension - that of true stealth and espionage. The other game I really enjoyed from it's storybook feel, interestingly from the same developers, was Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time. (Such a disappointment that they felt to turn up the gore and somewhat lose the fantastic epic adventure storybook feel in the sequel. This shows where the focus of the industry lies nowadays.)

  Games having true invention like this are becoming more and more rare. The newer game types are probably coming with new kinds of input device, and in some cases inventive use of new technology enabled by the hardware. Truly original game experiences of late have been things like Dance & Karaoke Revolution series which use floor mat and microphone as input devices and games that use a camera (like the EyeToy) to detect physical body movement. I am looking forward to trying the EyeToy out with my family this Christmas.

  My list of truly inventive games over the years starts with Elite. The game that realized the most powerful aspect of game design is imagination. The true skill of game creation is to unleash that power within the gaming environment.

  Other games showing true innovation to create a truly memorable gaming experience that come to mind are Lemmings, The Incredible Machine (and it's classic comical counterpart The Incredible Toons) and Battlezone by Pandemic.

  Posted by: red3 on November 29, 2005 at 02:34 PM

• I think similar about the recent release of the XBOX 360 like you. I started playing video games in the early 80s and I just don't want to play basically the same game with better graphics and a few complaints fixed over and over again. So, I bought a Nintendo DS and I don't regret it. I was especially astonished by the ease of use and the creativity of the UI-Designers!

  Posted by: andre on November 29, 2005 at 03:00 PM

• Any idea why Facade doesn't translate xplat as is? I've admittedly not learned OpenGL, but I would have expected many of the plainer janer calls would translate to OS X (and Linux, for all that matters) without much trouble.

  Posted by: rufwork on November 29, 2005 at 07:01 PM

• Actually I still play to The Incredible Machine (and its sequels) :)

  Posted by: gfx on November 29, 2005 at 07:03 PM

• 
  I started playing video games in the early 80s.

  XBOX 360 ROCKS IN HDTV! ALL OTHER CONSOLES ARE NOW OBSOLETE! GO MULTITHREAD YOUR JAVA GAMES ON YOUR 1.2 SDK WITHOUT THE HELP OF THE NEW CONCURRENT PACKAGE! YOU ARE OBSOLETE!
  

  Posted by: phlogistic on November 30, 2005 at 01:46 PM

• Phlogistic, Java has threading build in since JDK 1.0. The new concurrent package only makes writing threaded programs easier.

  Posted by: chukmunnlee on November 30, 2005 at 05:49 PM

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