A few days ago I received a message from a friend on Twitter; join #badmovieclub it said. Turns out it was spawned from Graham Linehan’s off the cuff tweet about getting people together to watch a bad movie at the same time. Graham who? He wrote the classic series Father Ted and more recently The IT Crowd.

Over a 3 day period that single tweet spiralled into a monster, the ugly kind with lots of eyes and more tentacles than the Bush administration. The idea resulted in a flash mob at 9pm Friday 13th February during which everyone would watch M Night Shyamalan’s movie The Happening at the same time, adding their own commentary via the #badmovieclub hashtag on Twitter.

The impressive thing wasn’t that thousands of people agreed to get together (virtually) in such a short space of time. It wasn’t that BadMovieClub got large numbers of people doing the same thing either. It was that one single well placed tweet managed to persuade so many of the movie going public to go out and watch a film as awful as "The Happening" in the first place!

With one comment Graham Linehan managed to do what movie studios pay their marketing departments millions of dollars to do – persuade thousands of people to watch a shoddy film.

The power of Twitter lies in the simplified nature of it. Unlike other forms of Instant Messaging or even the Facebook status system, Twitter messages can be seen by everyone. When people tweeted about BadMovieClub, they were promoting BadMovieClub. There was no need for any kind of ad campaign because the mere act of tweeting on the hashtag alerted a user’s followers to its existence.

On Friday evening many Twitter users suddenly found their Twitter message box full of seemingly nonsensical tweets about bees, wind, plastic plants, and Marky Mark’s furrowed brow. When you see your friends all talking about the same thing, it’s only natural to want to join in. When you know there is a celebrity involved, you find yourself trying to impress just to get them to retweet (RT) your comment.

BadMovieClub didn’t just stop at Twitter, however. Many people made a night of it, having friends around to watch the movie, even displaying the Tweets on a giant screen. The national press have also got in on the act, with both Metro and Sky News reporting the event (a minute or so into the video clip). I guess I have to ask you to look out for my newretro avatar on the sky footage! Yes, that’s my tweet and yes I really did quite like Point Break, even if I’d rather that wasn’t broadcast to the whole nation – can I sue Sky for that I wonder?.

As flash mobs go, and this was a flash mob even if it was quite raw, I believe this to be the first ever on Twitter. Sure there have been flash mobs organised over Twitter, but I believe this one was the first actually held on Twitter, as well as in your lounge, your bedroom, your PC, your mobile phone, or where ever you happened to be.

To glinner, badmovieclub, jupitusphillip, lauriepink, and all the others that took part – I salute you! There are plans being discussed for future events, so follow badmovieclub and keep an eye on the BadMovieClub website for news.

Now please excuse me whilst I try and contribute to Graham and Phil’s Monkey vs Bear war on Twitter. On Twitter, you see, we are all only 1 degree of separation away from each other; and Darth Vader has an awful lot of friends, although not as many as Stephen Fry.

We’re micro-blogging our stop-motion console game Cletus Clay at cletusclay, and you can find several of the Tuna team on Twitter: newretro, SarahQ, andrewcrawshaw, stationBob and clay_Ape.

Secondly, I’m immensely proud to say that Cletus Clay has been nominated for the IGF Excellence in Visual Arts award. It feels amazing to have one of our games nominated, but I feel it important to point out that the nomination is particularly down to Anthony Flack, not just as designer, but who’s work formed the bulk of the submission (a lot of our effort is still very much work in progress).

There’s some interesting games in the IGF Nominations this year, and I really can’t predict who is going to win out.

One of the Grand Prize nominees is the intriguing Dyson; TunaSnax have just posted up an interview we did with them before Christmas. It’s the story about how they got this far and you can read it here.

Best of luck to all the nominees. See you in San Francisco!

It’s a great parody featuring Bizzare Creations’ Geometry Wars, or rather the making of it.

I popped over to the LoadingReadyRun homepage and found another good video, this time featuring Wii games that never made it. The last couple are particuarly funny, stick with it! This video is probably not for the easily offended; you have been warned.

A storm is brewing over indie games Castle Crashers and Braid. A Japanese website has published the proposed price points for these much anticipated titles, 1800 points and 1200 points resepectively. Meanwhile the blogs at Behemoth and Destructoid (amongst others) are filling up with riled users unsure what to make of it all, as you can see by the Destructoid image below:

The first thing to say is that I expect the Western price point of Castle Crashers to be 1600 points rather than 1800, but I can’t confirm that with any insider knowledge right now. I’m sure the matter will be cleared up ASAP, possibly even today.

So what’s the problem? Assuming 1600 points, that’s $19.99 for a top quality game. Here are some of the issues along with my take on them.

If I’m paying more than $10, I want a boxed copy and no DRM rubbish

There are two issues here. Firstly, it looks like it will take some time for console game buyers to get used to the idea of buying games without a box attached. PC users have been doing this for years, and at a standard price point of $19.99 (casual games and bigger indie games), so there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this model. Secondly, there is distrust of Microsoft’s DRM model. Console gamers are used to take/loaning discs to mates, and Microsoft currently provide no adequate method to deal with this, or to transfer ownership (for a fee perhaps). Also, if Microsoft stop supporting the system, you may not be able to play the game in future.

It’s too expensive for a download game

Not really. Castle Crashers is competing time-wise with the big games out there. Sure, it isn’t Halo, but so what? I’ll play Castle Crashers more than Halo, so what does it matter?

Developers are money grabbing because they know we want Braid and Castle Crashers

Indie developers struggle to get their games made, and are unlikely to get rich off them. In fact, they are just trying to make enough to develop their next game, with Microsoft et al wanting ever bigger, flashier titles.

Game development, particularly console game development, is extremely expensive. While a Flash game may take 2-6 weeks for 1-2 people, a console game – even on XBLA – may take 1-2 years and 4-8 people, as well as a lot of additional QA/localisation/hardware/rating/marketing related costs. You don’t have to be an accountant to see the difference. It’s very high risk and profits are hard to come by, especially for an understaffed, overworked indie with no corporate investors to pay for production.

Microsoft are charging me more than 1600 points = US$19.99 because I’m in Canada, UK, etc

Now this I am sympathetic with. As a developer, we base everything on the US rates because that’s what affects us. Microsoft charge more elsewhere because of sales tax and their own reasons. I suggest people write to MS to discuss that particular issue, but don’t blame the poor indie for a console pricing policy.

It’s only a simple brawler / platformer. I’m not paying more than $10 for that!

You know what? Give the games a go and if you think they are worth the money then buy them. If not, then leave them alone. Anyone who thinks a game should be priced by genre is rather foolish in my opinion. You don’t do this with film or music or television! Tetris and Dr Mario were super simple yet have taken more of my gaming hours than most FPS titles. It’s all about value for money, about entertainment.

In summary, console users are still very new to the whole download thing and the lack of a boxed copy still resonates as a problem. I think Microsoft (and Sony and Nintendo) should look at their DRM systems as I think there are ways to mitigate some of people’s concerns. Also, perhaps a boxed copy could be part of the deal with a little extra $$$?

However, give the games a go and treat them as with any other game you’ll buy. It doesn’t matter how much they cost, what the license is, who made them (indie or otherwise), retail or digital – if you like them enough then they are good enough.

For the record, I’m a huge fan of both games – although I’ve played Braid more than Castle Crashers as I have access to it – and I’m a fan of the talented and friendly people behind them.

EDIT: Great opinion piece on Gamasutra where 2D Boy (World of Goo) explains issues with XBox Live Arcade for indies.

They’re honestly the coolest thing to have on your desk or mantlepiece or – for some people – in specialist toy display cabinets! Most of these toys are design by talented individuals or small design outfits, such as Sheffield’s Tado, who I’ve been lucky enough to work with. I find the range of designs very inspiring, particularly the way many toys are customised.

For example, meet my Munny, handpainted by one of our artists.

If you want your own Munny, or other toys, visit sites such as KidRobot, Octane3, Forbidden Planet, Tokyo Toy Store, or my current favourite UrbanRetro (who also do fabulous iPod gelaskins such as the one I have – the Exploding Dog robot design which always gets a few aaahs). For those interested, you can find daily news on an amazing assortment of designer toys over at Tomopop or Vinyl Pulse. Careful though, you’ll want one, and then another one, and then another. Before you know it, you’ll be addicted.

Here are some more Munny pics – picked out from abduzeedo’s inspiring design blog.

To wrap up – no pun intended Mr Mummy Munny – 138 Munnies by French collective Jeanspezial were designed in 2 weeks and can be found here.

It’s fair to say that I’m probably not best placed to judge this game but it seems to keep one of the Tuna team busy and if he thought the game sucked then he’d say so. Several times. He hasn’t (yet), so it must be pretty damn good.

More seriously, narrative within games is a huge talking point these days and is something I will no doubt discuss in a future post. MGS obviously does something right in this regard, despite Yahtzee’s reservations.