Because I get asked quite a bit, here it is:

James Silva – I MAED A S0NG W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1

(Probably want to right-click, Save As…)

I think I finally got the mastering to a “respectable” level, but no promises!  Also, the first thing I noticed upon revisiting this mp3 was that without the game going on, the song is… empty.  But hey, whatever, it’s free, so enjoy the heck out of it!

Update: Some wonkiness is afoot; if you can’t get the download working, just navigate to http://ska-studios.com/files/epicopus.mp3 and choose Save As… (unless QuickTime snarkily tries to play it in-browser!)

Update 2: I put it up as a zip too, that might be a better bet.

Title says it all, we’re #1! (top rated, too!)

And holy roundup, Batman:

• Kotaku would pay $1 just for the theme song
• Destructoid calls it this year’s “Still Alive”
• Joystiq thinks it’s “astounding”
• GameGirl is hooked
• GamingAngels was blown away by the awesomeness of the game
• TheXboxDomain liked the awesome music, addictive qualities, great replay value
• IndieGames.com thinks it’s way too much fun for its own good

50,000 downloads, 6,237 ratings and an average score of 4.75, these are freaking excellent numbers.  This was exactly what I had in mind when I heard Microsoft was rebranding XBLCG as Xbox Live Indie Games and switching the price points to let us sell games for $1.  It’s indie! It’s a dollar! It’s the type of thing that would’ve seemed like a really bad idea if you were trying to describe it to someone you wanted to borrow money from!

And to think that Joystiq’s Andrew Yoon just declared that XBLIG is “floundering” (qualified by a 5-month old article, no less).  Guess we can chalk that one up to Playstation fanboyism!  Of course, if Sony created some sort of zero-entry-barrier developer-friendly platform (think XNA), maybe my PS3 could be more than just a protein folding Blu-Ray player… burn!

For Immediate Release:

Ska Studios LLC today announced a truly epic title in the true tradition of epicness with its latest video game entertainment product release, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1, set for release August 16, 2009 on the Xbox Live Indie Games for 80 Microsoft Points.

Presenting a familiarly themed, engrossing and stylized “game universe,” then adding zombies to that world, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!1 aims to completely revolutionize the videogames industry, destroy it in fire a thousand times, and resurrect it as a phoenix sitting on a unicorn atop a shiny city of golden gumdrops.  As we say at Ska Studios LLC, “our games will pique your interest and defenestrate your cats.”

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!1 represents a culmination of years of intensive psychological research, bleeding edge engineering, and artistic collaboration by over two dozen internationally recognized art houses that may or may not exist, using such technologies as the HYPERMAGIC 3.0 engine to power never-before-seen eye candy and the MEGACORE X parallelization processor for smooth-as-glass presentation.

“You can make a game,” said Ska Studios Lead Engineer Gato Maria Hernando Rodriguez-Rodriguez in an exclusive interview with Chairman Meow Magazine, “but what happens when you put zombies in it?  Nobody knows, but they’ll find out soon.  We’ll all find out soon.”  And, with Xbox Live Indie Games interest flagging under reports of poor sales, difficulty locating the section in the Dashboard while inebriated, and super-smart people saying super-smart things on web forums, the game couldn’t be released at a better time.

“We were following trends and noticed that most people were buying Xbox360s for the DVD player, the Xbox Live Vision Camera, and the Calculator app on XBLIG, but not for games,” Gato continues, “I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES!!1 will change that.  You’ll be playing our game.  It has zombies in it.  Ok bye.”

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 will arrive on Xbox Live Indie Games on August 16, 2009.  It will cost 80 Microsoft Points.

I haven’t done much with Xbox Community Games in awhile (this will change soon; I just need a break from Super Secret XNA Project 2.0), but that hasn’t stopped me from reading some fun articles lambasting the service for promising wealth, fame, and Princess-Bride-caliber true love, only to turn around and steal candy from orphans.

The main criticisms, as far as I can tell are:

• Microsoft hasn’t done enough to market XBLCG
• Microsoft has not made Community Games visible enough in the dash
• Stupid apps are taking all of the sales

So put your money where your mouth is.  If XBLCG is such a tragic platform, why not release on Windows?

Here’s why:

• Visibility: Criticize XBLCG’s lack of marketing all you want, but for any hobbyist developer with minimal connections and no budget, having your game show up on the New Arrivals list ensures that (wild guesstimate) hundreds of thousands of people will see it.  If it looks good, they’ll download it.  If it’s fun, they’ll buy it.  What’s the alternative?  Well, for a Windows release you’d want to send press releases to and review codes to all of the indie game review sites you know, enter IGF, try to generate some buzz here and there, and hope for the best.  Of course, if you make an XBLCG game, you can still send out press releases and enter IGF.  Couldn’t hurt!
• Upselling: Speaking of review codes, how will you generate those?  For my first shareware game, I used a “give me your code and I’ll send you the unlock code” system, which meant I had to check my email every day (back in the era when email wasn’t quite as central to life) and drop everything, launch my “unlock” app, generate a key and send a form email reply.  XBLCG takes care of this automagically.
• Payment Processing: I’m not sure what the scene for this is like today, but when I got started I was using Paypal, which, again, meant a lot of “send me your code and I’ll send you the unlock” nonsense.  There are payment processor sites like digitalriver and Esellerate, but these all have specific systems that are tedious to trudge through, and it’s obnoxious/impossible to make the transition from your site to the payment processor site less than majorly tacky.  None of this is particularly awful, but what is is that in order to buy your game, the user has to find a credit card, enter sensitive information onto a website he or she has never heard of, and maybe even sign up for yet another account.  People don’t like doing this.  On Xbox Live, the account is already there, the credit card is already there, and the points are there.
• Installer/Uninstaller: On Windows I was using Nullsoft Install System.  It worked, but wasn’t pretty: lots of XML editing in Notepad.  I guess Installshield is wonderful, but expensive.  Of course, if you’ve pirated Installshield, you deserve all the bad karma you’ll get on the next point:
• Piracy: You can’t pirate XBLCG games.  Indie games on Windows are, quite tragically, probably the easiest games to pirate.  While EA et al can invest lots of people and money into DRM, Indies can’t, and even when they try, they end up irritating a lot of people and getting cracked anyway.
• Support: For a Windows release, you have to make sure the game runs.  If it doesn’t, the customer will come back asking for a refund.  Or they’ll want you to help them troubleshoot.  Frustration ensues, usually culminating in a refund.  On Xbox360, if it works on yours, it works on theirs.  Wonderfully enough, in the Marketplace, the description closes with a “there are no refunds for this item.”

If you get your game released on a portal (especially something like Steam), you nail some visibility, piracy, support, and payment issues.  But you’ve got to get approved.  Good luck getting on Steam; I assume they put a lot of attention into maintaining a diverse portfolio.  I’ve had a game on GarageGames and one on Reflexive, and both did pretty poorly.

So what about all the lack of marketing and abundance of craptastic apps on XBLCG?  XBLCG gets compared to the iPhone App Store a lot.  So why shouldn’t we see “there’s an app for that” ads from Microsoft? Well, it’s the economy, stupid.

Let’s say you buy an iPhone.  It makes calls.  It plays music.  And hey, I can’t believe this, I can play Tower Defense! Tower Defense, nay, an army of Tower Defense games, on a phone is a new, exciting phenomenon!  Everyone loves Tower Defense games.  Now, on iPhone, they’re playable on a touch screen, they’re cheap, and they look gorgeous.  It’s a step up.

Now try releasing a tower defense game on XBLCG.  The games machine that’s capable of pumping out 60 fps of glorious, high def  Command and Conquer or Halo Wars at 720p can also play… Fieldrunners.  Heck, you don’t even get the coolness of pinching to zoom.  It’s a step down.

This is why those stupid XBLCG apps that everyone loves to blame are doing well.  They hit markets that aren’t touched by the rest of the platform: painting, music creation, (ugh) massage apps, drum kits, etc.  In the Xbox360 market of painting, music creation, massage and drum kits, these apps are a step up.

And someone’s got to say it: all of the poor marketing, poor visibility and app overcrowding in the world can’t doom a game that wasn’t fun to play in the first place.  Make better games, people!  All of this blaming nonsense just hurts everyone, and tragically generates more blogroll buzz than any yay-XNA articles do.

Final word?  Quit complaining.  XBLCG is a great platform, but it’s not a magical money generator (unless you make yet-another-massage-game).  Just making a game does not guarantee you success and wealth and fame and happiness, but putting that game out on XBLCG definitely gives you a sweet head start.

We’re two days in to E3 and, pretty true to trends, I’ve managed to forget to blog again. The best reason for this is that I have essentially no wireless Internet at my hotel, so the day is saved only by the fact that I have an iPhone.

Still, I should relate a few cool things that have happened:

- Jeff Gerstmann impromptu interviewed me. I’ve always wanted to meet him, so I gushed like an idiot the whole time. Seriously.

- I realized that El Pollo Loco sells magical grilled burritos that have that power to end all forms of sadness and suffering.

- Walking 1.3 miles to and from the center every day gets old fast, but I still welcome the challenge!

- My experience is completely unlike David Jaffe’s whatever that means.

Fun, fun.

I update on Twitter much more frequently, name is @Jamezila.

Hey all, I know status updates have been infrequent (I’m more active as @Jamezila on twitter these days), but may as well pop in for some E3 updates.

Now I am in an airport in Syracuse, NY. It’s 5 AM and I haven’t slept. Little tired, little wired .

Update over.

I got some Dishwasher codes to give out, so I think I’m gonna send a few out over Twitter!

Follow me!  I’m @Jamezila (just like my gamertag)

Also, Nick Gravelyn launched xblcg.info, an online database for all things XBLCG.  Ratings are in effect, so, if you’re hankering for some cheap Xbox360 homebrew, check it out!

And if you’re going to be at E3, drop me a line.  I’m finally able to fund my own trips, and also I didn’t realize that I get in for free as an “industry professional.”  Is indie pro now?  Eh… can I really care?

Dishwasher is #1 on Major Nelson’s list for the second week in a row!  Awesome thanks to everyone who gave it a shot.  It’s been a long, crazy road, fraught with peril and chainsaws, but I think it worked!

Anyway, Dishwasher has been in the hands of merciless reviewers for almost a fortnight.

I’ve noticed a trend: everyone thinks that The Dishwasher is either an awesome game or a button masher.

This leads me to conclude that if you don’t play The Dishwasher like a button masher, you’ll think it’s an awesome game.  If you do play The Dishwasher like a button masher, well, eh… here’s what happens:

• You’ll get bored
• You’ll die
• You’ll get bored of dying
• You’ll write a review about how the game is boring and you die… and, seeing as it involves hand-drawn quirky art, must be compared to Alien Hominid

The Dishwasher is full of tricky, clever strategies that you must use if you want to make it on the higher difficulties.  Play the game like a button masher and you won’t really see what all the fuss is about.  Seems like the world of games journalism is divided into the “gamer” crowd and the “cooking mama” crowd.

So, here’s official word from the developer: Dishwasher is not a button masher!

Thank you.

I got a bunch of emails from indie gaming sites telling me they reviewed Dishwasher and loved it.  Here they are, after the jump:

Diehard GameFAN praised the “white knuckle difficulty combined with the non-stop action.”  They also won my undying love with this gem:

The challenge will put some people off of the game since if you try to button mash through it or do not get the hang of managing enemies and using combos, there is no way to progress.

Duh!

Dutch Gaming Society epically declared “Het is gelijktijdig een liefdesverklaring naar de brawlers van vroeger en een bewijs van vooruitgang binnen het genre. It is simultaneously a love declaration to the brawlers of the past and proof of progress within the genre.”  Google translate FTW!

FreezeCracker said “Overall, this game is for the gamers who label themselves hardcore and drink milk out of the carton. If you have the drive to learn and perfect the ways of the samurai in a video game, then hell yeah I will recommend you buy this the hell right now. The amount of replay value is insane, and I can promise you will be able to see yourself playing this game months from now, even years.”

And finally, a bunch of [CONTENT WARNING] Canadians did a video review:

Update: My Belgian friend Loïc was quick to point out that I’ve done it: I’ve pulled the “reviewers don’t understand me” trick!  I’ve gone emo!  Sorry about the whine!  I’m not sure if we had a bet going on this one, but I may end up having to ship more Hello Kitty merchandice to Belgium if we did .

My roommate just reclaimed the #2 spot on Dish Challenge with 573,247,350.  Looks like Spear of Lament is currently #1, with an insane score of 735,225,250.  Meanwhile, I’m at #274 with an uber-pathetic score of 97,542,900, partly because the only time I tried it after launch was Dishwasher Day and I’d already had a few cups of wine, as my mom was keen to point out.  Yes, my mom drove out for Dishwasher Day.

Anyway, maybe we should talk about how the scoring works!  

Every time you hit someone, the combo meter fills up.  You don’t want the combo meter to run out, if you do, the combo ends.  Arsenal is great for linking combos together–shooting down-but-not-executed enemy is great for keeping that meter full.

Every time you hit someone who has some health left, you get damage * 100 points.

Every time you kill someone, for clean and messy kills you get their max health * 50 points, for other kills you get their max health * 150 points.  Why the discrepancy?  Well, let’s talk about multipliers.

As you rack up hits and kills, you’re racking up multipliers; when your combo meter runs out, you get points * multiplier score.

Here’s the breakdown on multipliers:

• Hit = 0.25x
• Normal Kill = 2x
• Messy Kill = 5x
• Clean Kill = 5x

So, if we kill a bad guy with 40 HP, we get:

• 40hp * 100 = 4000 from damage
• 40hp * 150 = 6000 from death
• 8 hits * 0.25x = 2x from hits
• +2x from death = 4x multiplier
• 10000 * 4x multiplier = 40000

But, kill the same guy with a mesy or clean kill, and we get:

• 40hp * 100 = 4000 from damage
• 40hp * 50 = 2000 from death
• 8 hits * 0.25x = 2x from hits
• +5x from death = 7x multiplier
• 6000 * 7x multiplier = 42000

Of course, if you try to do all this math in your head while playing Dish Challenge, you’ll probably die.  Not in real life, I mean.

Fitting heading for a game about a dead samurai, eh?

I just put the flash site up at thedishwasherdeadsamurai.com.  Try to find the secret Neko video (no, not the age gate fail Neko video.  Hint: Sandra Bullock in The Net).

I think there was a bit of a marketing mishap leading into this: several months ago, gamerscoreblog wanted some previously unheard of Dishwasher facts for a post, so I told them about the killer solo minigames and hidden phantom guitar and shadow co-op features.  They posted on this, and somewhere in the shuffle, the secret features became selling points.

So, if you bought The Dishwasher just for killer solos or phantom guitar co-op, you may be disappointed because:

• there are only 3 killer solo tracks and
• phantom guitar is not a selling point.  It’s alright, but, well, there’s really only so much you can do with a guitar controller in an action game.

However, the rest of the game’s not that bad, right?  Well…

• TeamXbox liked it: “The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is an amazing game, even if you don’t have any idea of how it came about or about the size of the studio that made it.”
• OXM liked it: “From how Dishwasher bleeds details with its goth-y antihero cleaving chumps in two to how its meaty, crunchy jabs and slashes feel, it’s all incredibly well done.”
• IGN thought it was ok: “The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is an enjoyable button masher and a commendable effort considering it’s the work of one person.”
• Teletext Game Central (???) hated it: “It may be a matter of taste but we didn’t like the murky, indistinct graphics, whose endless spurts of blood fail to really titillate.”

What the heck is Teletext Game Central?

Anyway, love it or hate it, it’s here!  Deal with it!

Now, if you are wondering about those special modes:

• The phantom guitar is enabled by finding the Amulet of Phantom Rock.  This is hidden near the start of Ivy Trail.
• The Dishwasher’s shadow is enabled by finding the Amulet of Shadow Skull.  This is near the Killer Solo Amp in St. Crux Cemetery.
• There are 3 Killer Solo Amps spread out in the main game.  There are an additional 3 Amps in Samurai difficulty.  If an Amp has a spotlight glowing on it, that means winning the solo will earn you a Psycho Pick.

Really though, they’re not selling points.  They’re fun features, but they’re ancillary.  Awesomely ancillary.

Now for the ugly:

There’s a bit of an achievement snafu.  To earn the Master of Arcade Dishwashing achievement, you have to beat level 50 in single player or local co-op.  This came up right at the end of testing; the logic for okaying it was that when you play over Live, you’re playing individual levels, not a continuous track of levels (hence no end credits); however, we should probably address this in a title update.  If we did try to smooth this over at the end of testing, the game could’ve been delayed another month.  Decisions…

Also, Dishwasher is getting a lot of weird comparisons.  Alien Hominid?  It just seems lazy–as if the market is only big enough for one side scroller with stylized art, regardless of the game play.  (I admit both games featuring CIA-style goons is a little suspect, but I had goons in Zombie Smashers X2 years before, and I put them in there as a nod to The Matrix/Reservoir Dogs/Anything Else Involving Guys With Suits and Guns)

Silly reviewers…

But then again, don’t we all know how I feel about game reviews?