02.27.08
Posted in Game news, Games at 21:21
Our instruments indicate that at some point this map contained readable and fairly important treasural information.
Unfortunately pirates store things underwater so the deal is blown.
I don’t play enough indie games. To be honest I almost never play them. I should because it’s looking like my most likely route into the industry and I’ve collected quite a few ideas by now (Larry keeps poking me about sharing but I’m still working on writing them all down in a good format).
My newspaper, Politiken, recently started reviewing games in their culture section, and the first batch of games to receive this honour were the winners of the IGF. I already knew the winner of the Audience Award Audiosurf from having played the beta - I didn’t enjoy it that much, it was fun enough in the beginning but after about half an hour I lost interest. The tech is cool but I don’t enjoy the gameplay. A game that caught my interest, however, was the winner of Best Web Browser Game, Iron Dukes.
I checked out the demo today and it was great. Being a preview, it doesn’t offer a lot of content, so I only played it for half an hour - but it kept me entertained that long, not least thanks to its outstanding sense of fun. Ever read Calvin & Hobbes? Remember the naïve, playfully nonsensical feeling of Calvin’s games? Iron Dukes replicates that perfectly - it truly seems like an illustration of a universe some kids have come up with to pass the time until their parents pick them up from kindergarten. Especially the item descriptions are laugh-out-loud funny. It’s wonderous. And since the demo is free and currently all there is, I think you should give it a try. I can’t guarantee that it won’t get repetitive after a few hours, but as far as the preview goes, it’s worth your time. You can play the Iron Dukes demo here, right in your browser!
- Game: Iron Dukes
- Music: Iron Maiden - Ghost Of The Navigator
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02.26.08
Posted in Game design, Game news at 21:39
My primary ambition right now is to make it to the GDC. Clearly it won’t be this year, since, you know… it’s already over. I’m hoping for next year, but I sincerely doubt it. For now, I’ll make do with Nordic Game, but it’s not quite the same.
So I ease the pain by reading all these great reports from the GDC, checking out the dev blogs regularly, finding videos of the presentations on RPS and elsewhere, and generally being a little OCD about it all. But that just makes it worse.
Never-the-less, here are two pretty awesome pieces of GDC I’ve managed to pick up over the last couple of days. First is a very very funny rant by Jane McGonigal titled Reality is Broken. I heartily recommend getting the slides too. If anybody knows where I can find a video of this rant or any of the other rants, I would be much obliged.
The second bit is Gamasutra’s summary of the Game Design Challenge, where I definitely think they picked the right winner. Any game design that can be sold with the phrase “the game that puts the fun back into fungicide” gets a star in my book!
I’m taking recommendations for other goodies I may have missed.
- Game: Crysis
- Music: Tool - The Pot
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02.25.08
Posted in Games at 18:45
The moisture of the forest bed can almost be felt through my nanosuit as I crawl through the rain-soaked bushes to the edge of the cliff. I look around, admiring the slowly shifting vapours under the palm trees, glittering with fresh mildew in the morning sun. The river in the canyon below reflects the pale light and glimmers like a picture on a post card. Behind the trees on the cliffs at the other side of the canyon, watch towers mark the location of the base I’m going to. Yeah, this spot will do just fine.
I break out my binoculars and do a quick zoomed out scan of the treeline. The hardware picks up a few soldiers patrolling the road between the camp and the bridge. Quickly locking them into my radar, I zoom in closer on the nearest watch tower where a sniper has let down his guard. For a few seconds I watch him completely fail to pay any attention to his surroundings, then lock him in as well before continuing along the road. Looks like the main entrance is pretty well guarded. Another soldier has manned a mounted machine gun and appears to be watching his patrolling friends - almost like he has a sense of what’s about to happen.
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- Game: Crysis
- Music: KoRn - Freak on a Leash
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02.24.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 02:22
So… simply for the hell of it, I just exported all of our conversation files from TNM, used Word’s excellent search and replace to clean out all the comments and name tags and seperators so only the actual lines remained, and then checked the count. I think the result entitles me to show off a little.
The Nameless Mod has:
13,224 lines
194,846 words
1,050,568 characters (with spaces)
868,897 characters (without spaces)
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: Velvet Revolver - Superhuman
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02.23.08
Posted in Games at 01:02
See what I did there?
I got Crysis in the mail this Tuesday and have been enjoying it for a few nights. My first impressions are very positive. First of all, the game runs surprisingly well on my rig - my X1900XT is still a pretty good card, but my single-core Athlon 64 3800+ is embarrassingly outdated now. In spite of this, the game runs fine with all settings on Medium and it looks just as good as Call of Duty 4. I can only imagine how it must look with everything on Very High, but I’m perfectly happy to play on Medium until I get a new CPU.
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- Game: Crysis
- Music: The Beach Boys - Kokomo
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02.20.08
Posted in Game design, Hardware/Technology at 18:53
I was just forwarded this news article about a headset that can read the player’s brain activity and translate it into commands for a game:
Brain control headset for gamers
Immediately a score of game ideas swam into my mind, and telekinesis was just the most obvious of them. How about a fantasy game where the power of your spells is influenced by how much brain activity you’re experiencing? Or where your spells might fail if you get too excited? A game where you get a time-limited berzerk if you get very agitated or an adrenaline bonus if you get excited during combat. Your aim with the sniper rifle steadying if you meditate a little. Your nemesis taunting you with how shocked you are to see him again after you thought he was dead!
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- Game: Crysis
- Music: Tim Christensen - Get The Fuck Out Of My Mind
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02.17.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 17:17
Playing Thief 3 last night, it slowly dawned on me that my primary attraction to the virtual worlds of video games is the exploration of mysterious spaces. That probably takes some explaining, so get comfortable because this will be a long one. It has pictures though!
Remember back in the days of Jazz Jackrabbit and Wolfenstein 3D when all games had Secrets™? Secrets could vary from doors that looked like part of the wall and invisible holes in the ground where you could fall through if you stood still to props that served as triggers for bookcases sliding aside to reveal hidden rooms. My experience with action and platform games back then, though, is that the former type of secret was much more common: Hidden areas completely unmotivated in the fiction of the game. Why have a section of wall that slides away when you nudge it?
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- Game: Thief - Deadly Shadows
- Music: Metallica - The House Jack Built
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02.16.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 15:00
If you think game balance is only important for multiplayer games, you are wrong. It’s true that balance can really make or break an MP game, and for that reason, a lot more time is often spent tweaking the way classes and weapons interact in a game such as Team Fortress 2 or Battlefield than is spent ensuring that the difficulty curve of a singleplayer game is nice and smooth on all settings.
But balancing a singleplayer game can be a pretty comprehensive project in and of itself. Seeing how TNM has been playable from start to finish for a couple of months, I reckoned it was about time to go over the amount of items in the game. Gelo complained a lot about a lack of equipment on his first playthrough, and initial datamining suggested that he was right.
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- Game: Thief - Deadly Shadows
- Music: Heroes del Silencio - Avalancha
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02.15.08
Posted in Personal at 15:40
Networking is important. In many industries, it’s true that it doesn’t matter what you know, but who you know. In entertainment industries, this tends to be even more true because there’s often an abundance of talented people available to hire, and the games industry certainly doesn’t appear to be an exception.
Some people just get networking. They can walk right up to a person they don’t know, shake his or her hand, exchange a few polite words and their business cards, and then move on to the next person, having just landed an important contact. Following up on such a meeting is even more intimidating, calling that person a few days later outside of the networking context of a convention or similar.
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- Game: Thief - Deadly Shadows
- Music: Pachelbel - Canon in D
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02.13.08
Posted in Game news at 23:12
I have another big TNM post in the pipeline, so here’s a small linkpost to keep your attention. A couple of excellent Warren Spector interviews have surfaced over the past few days, and I’ve been lucky enough to catch them right away since I started reading Kotaku and the deliciously named Rock, Paper, Shotgun every day. They seem to mostly be about scaring the living daylights out of Warren’s old fans (including half my readers, no doubt), but personally I remain stubbornly optimistic about his upcoming Walt Disney games. Honestly, it’s Warren, how bad can they be?
In chronological order, first the Edge interview via NextGen:
Warren Spector’s Rodent Love Shock
And then Kieron Gillen’s interview at RPS:
RPS Exclusive: Warren Spector Interview
I love Kieron mainly for being as big a DX fan as I am (almost), so him interviewing Warren is obviously interesting.
On a possibly amusing side note, I came so close to requesting Warren’s permission to add him on LinkedIn, but at the last minute I chickened out on grounds of - to be fair - not knowing the man. Eventually I will bribe him with a TNM CD and then hopefully he’ll let me add him 
- Game: Halo 3
- Music: The Young Dubliners - Bodhran
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