01.26.08
Posted in Game design, Game news at 15:43
Despite the risk of turning this place into a newsblog, I just have to address this MMOG that NASA is planning:
Wired: Would You Play World of Warcraft, NASA-style?
The idea is to create a virtual world that mimics the physics, scientific goals, and presumably the realistic mission profiles of the space agency’s real-world activity. Which is an entirely admirable goal. But I might add a few words of advice: Add space orcs.
I really like the idea of less combat-oriented MMOG’s, but the question of “What does the player do all day?” seems to always get in the way of this. Of course there’s The Sims Online and Second Life, but these seem more like social platforms than any sort of actual game. A game has rules, goals, obstacles, and rewards all built into it, and by far the most repeatable form of content for a game is good old-fashioned violence. If you have a good, fun combat system with place for variety, all you need to do is provide some different weapons and switch out the enemies every now and then, and you can pretty much populate a 100-hour game with nothing but one skirmish after the other.
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- Game: Guitar Hero 3
- Music: Killswitch Engage - My Curse
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01.24.08
Posted in Game news, Other media at 01:05
I gotta say, EA very rarely gets the sympathy vote from me, being that they usually fill the role of the Faceless Megacorp who buy smaller successful studios only to squeeze them for every dollar they’re worth and then shut them down. However, I have to give them kudos for their handling of Fox News’ outrageously slanderous segment about the sexual content in Mass Effect. I’ve already discussed the subject to death on the forums I frequent, and I know there’s nothing I could possibly add to EA’s letter itself, so I might as well just link you to Kotaku’s reproduction of it so you can enjoy the experience of Fox News receiving the retaliation their incompetence calls for:
Kotaku: EA Calls Fox Out on “Insulting” Mass Effect Inaccuracies
I especially enjoyed this particular huge burn:
As video games continue to take audiences away from television, we expect to see more TV news stories warning parents about the corrupting influence of interactive entertainment. But this represents a new level of recklessness.
Ouch. Touché, EA! Touché 
- Game: Mass Effect
- Music: Linkin Park - No More Sorrow
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01.22.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 23:19
And that person in turn retaliates with lengthy self-indulgent ramblings. I did an interview with my good friend Rasmus over on his RazuBlog. Unfortunately he really understimated just how windbaggy I can get when asked to talk about game theory and TNM in particular. In the end, he had to split the interview into two blog posts for readability. Part one is here, part two is here. Hope you enjoy
- Game: Mass Effect
- Music: Bear McCreary - All Along The Watchtower
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01.17.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 17:28
(Warning: Minor The Witcher spoilers)
My name is Geralt of Rivia. I am a Witcher - I kill monsters for a living. You may think of me as a more macho Van Helsing, but without the steampunk and I live in a traditional fantasy world. I’ve just left the graveyard in the city of Vizima, having cut swathes through ghouls and vampires - I’m sorry, “fledder” - and now I’m on my way, my sack tightly packed with trophies, to collect my rewards for the three contracts I’ve fulfilled in there. My first stop is the local dentist who took over the shop of the private eye I worked with briefly. He said he’d pay me for the teeth I pulled out of the festering mouths of the ghouls I killed in the graveyard, and he better make good on that deal or he can add his own teeth to his collection.
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- Game: The Witcher
- Music: Superbus - Radio Song
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01.15.08
Posted in Games at 11:07
So I played Kane & Lynch with Casper yesterday. Unfortunately the dunce forgot to bring a second controller, so we had to take turns in singleplayer. I’ve ordered a new controller today so it won’t happen again, but because we didn’t have one yesterday, I can’t write about the co-op. Yet.
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- Game: Kane & Lynch
- Music: Kent - Vinternoll 2
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01.11.08
Posted in Personal at 11:44
I have a very ambivalent relationship to sleep. On the one hand, “sleep is for the weak” as I always say. I’ll have plenty of time to sleep when I’m old, now is the time to stay up late and get up early while my body can take the punishment. But on the other hand if I get less than 8 hours of sleep I just don’t function very well, and anything less than 6 hours of sleep will completely eradicate my day.
There are few things as nice as waking up around 11 and just lounging around in your bed with a cat or two and some terrible American sitcoms until noon (or Rumblefish, if you hit the TV jackpot! What were they thinking airing a film like that when nobody who cares is home to watch? Well, except slacking film students, I suppose).
Still, time spent sleeping is time not spent watching a great film or playing a great game or reading a great book or working on TNM. I can’t help but feel it’s a bloody waste of time. I really need to learn to meditate.
- Game: Mass Effect (2nd playthrough, Renegade ftw)
- Music: Mountain - Mississippi Queen
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01.07.08
Posted in Games at 23:45
Today I finished Mass Effect.
I have a hard time describing how good it is. On one side, I’m coloured by the immediate after effects of completing a good game, so I can’t really say for sure if it’s actually better than both Knights of the Old Republic games, but on the other hand it sure feels like it right now.
First of all, the storyline was perfect. The plot structure was impressively open until the end, the branches felt significant, the choices were often difficult, the characters were compelling and interesting, the acting and writing was thoroughly sublime, every piece of dialogue was somehow littered with terrific animations and cinematic camera work, and the intrigue was mysterious and exciting.
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01.02.08
Posted in Game design, Games, The Nameless Mod at 18:47
Finally turned in my paper today and thought it was time to get back to the endgame script for TNM. When I looked through it I was struck by just how damn huge it is - and how little of it you’ll get to see on each playthrough. So far it’s 18 pages - 11 pages of endgame cinematics, 6 pages of what I’ve written of the denouement so far, and a cover sheet. That’s a lot, incidentally. Since I’ve used standard script format it more or less matches 17 minutes of cutscenes, and I’m not even half done with the denouement yet, my guesstimate is that just that sequence may end up around 15 pages or more. But at any given time, you’ll only see a couple of minutes of it at most.
This is a trend in the design of TNM: We deny you access to a lot of content based on your choices. Each main storyline has 4 maps that aren’t present in the other storyline, meaning at the very least you’ll be missing 4 maps on each playthrough, and a couple of these make up entire missions. Then there are the optional maps - the ones related to side quests, the ones with bonus stuff, the Corporate District sewers that you may never visit but in which is hidden a bunch of cool content… and that’s to say nothing of the dialogue, the background story, the characters etc.
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- Game: Mass Effect
- Music: Within Temptation - Ice Queen
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01.01.08
Posted in Personal at 01:38
Happy new year, guys. 2008, huh? Seems like it’ll be nice so far. Quiet, as usual. I could totally go for a party right now, but everybody I know is either celebrating with their family (like me) or crunching on their non-fiction paper for the 2nd. For the record I finished it today and made both 22 pages and the 1000 page curriculum, and Mass Effect is frickin’ great. Mass Effect is the primary reason I feel like partying right now, because it kept me up until 7 am this morning, so I slept until 1 pm and am at present nowhere near tired. But as Gelo said, at least I’ve got company over MSN. That sounds a lot sadder than it really is, btw.
Here’s some fireworks from out of my window an hour ago, you’re only getting it in 200×150 because I didn’t use a tripod and I took ‘em through the glass so they’re both blurry and shaken 
PS. Casper, my fellow game-obsessed media student and coworker until the 25th, finally got some actual content up on his blog, but he went and wrote it in Danish, so most of you won’t get it. Ah well, maybe that’ll teach him a lesson about not limiting his audience. It’s a good post though, and it has a lot of Scarlett Johansson in it, which is always a plus. Added him to my blogroll too.
- Game: Mass Effect (finally!)
- Music: Carlos Santana - Black Magic Woman
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