Nintendo had it’s thing going with some zapper games and Mario Galaxy. We were told that Brawl would be there but that didn’t happen. No sweat! we changed our competition from Frog Bog (INTV) to Smash Bros. 64. We were one of the busiest zones because of it. Winners walked out with some classic NES or SNES games.

I’m eager to see what next year’s theme will be. they had the space station theme this year. I won’t be part of the game to create the zone for a fourth year, but i have faith that the team that was there would be happy to continue my steps. I have some other stuff to do around that time of the year (with the MIGS and all), but i’m also working on some other stuff that has to do with Arcadia

Once again we brought our old consoles for people to play and we stayed with that old school feel. This year we had a museum section also. A Neo Geo AES and Apple/Bandai Pippin were biggest treasures.

This years musical acts were TouchBoy, FreezePop, and Minibosses who were back promoting their first studio album. We had the opportunity to film the Minibosses show so I can make it available for download if anybody wishes.

The Show was absolutely completely dominated by Nintendo and the playable Wii. To be released soon after Arcadia everyone was lining up to give it a whirl.

it was fun. I was also interviewed by a journalist who quoted me. it’s in french but it’s there. (News Article)

Dawn of Heroes Logo

While at Wicked Studios, I was working on Dawn of Heroes for Nintendo DS(i). it’s a Turn Based Tactics Puzzle game. The puzzle part makes people wonder usually, but there is nothing to be feared; When you see the game you’ll get it. It’s not like the other tactic games out there.

I was Programmer / Game Designer on this project. Working in a small team, I was pretty much all over the place. I worked on so many different systems it’s hard for me to name them all. 2D engine, Wireless / Wi-Fi, Gameplay, and so much more. On the design front, I worked on many of the battles, balancing and creating the puzzles. I also worked a much of the gameplay design.

The game is finished and in the publisher’s hand at this point. let’s hope they release it soon.

This trailer dates from 2007 when we first announced the game at TGS. They were all DS assets, but they were rendered in Maya. The music isn’t ours, it was added by the user who uploaded the video, but it’s the video with the most views.The other videos can be seen on the official Dawn of Heroes website.

The second page has a video interview I did.

I was the main organiser of the Flashback Zone, and this is how it came about.When members of the CCJVQ learned of the festival, Yan (then club president), contacted the organisers of the festival who liked the idea of having a retro zone.Unfortunately Yan became very busy and unable to continue with the organisation. He then left it to me to continue.

We built an area with consoles and portables for people to play. Both CCJVQ and CGCC were represented. Atari was generous enough to display their (yet unreleased) Atari Flashback 2.0 at the festival. I must say it was one of the most popular areas of the Festival, certainly one having the most Media attached to it.

Some things to note are the box, Trailers, Ads, ratings, etc. Marketing is what makes a game sell in the end. 50 top selling games is the goal here. This is not easy to find as most of that information is held by marketing research groups. It was agreed that I could look at the top selling games of the quarter or month, and as time passes new top selling games will appear. So i went on www.ign.com and www.NPD.com, and www.gamespot.com and looked at the top sellers. I would only look at a game that was on a top sellers list for 2 months or on quarterly lists.

This one did take less time than the first, but it still took some 200 to 250 hours to complete. It was interesting to find the patterns in here. It’s a big contradiction to the first challenge sometimes. Similar to the first challenge here are all the games I looked at as well as a 3 page discussion of ideal marketing.

• Challenge 2 – Complete The whole list is here all confounded. Notice how some games are pretty bad. but still sell because of other aspects of the marketing machine (190kb)
• Discussions on Ideal Marketing – A 3 page paper outlining aspects that I believe are important in the marketing process of a game (69kb)

I thought this was an interesting challenge because it obliged you to look and play games that you might not play any other time. I played Madden games from 2001 all the way through 2005. I had never played Madden before. It also allowed me to discover games that I had previously dismissed, and now want to own because of this (ICO anyone?).

I submitted my final 25 games and was advised by David Perry that i was been the first to complete this challenge. I’ve made available here my research in PDF format. As an extra I also wrote a 6 page paper on some ideal elements that should be included or at least considered when designing a game.