Old people swearing is always funny. Old people swearing at video games is hilarious.
I suppose I’ll be one of those relatively soon.
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Fresh Hell pointed out a couple of good articles on ScriptSecrets.net which discusses an interesting topic – how to make movies on the cheap. It resonated with me since we have similar issues when building games as well. As much as we’d like everything to be the biggest and best, and as much as MMOs inherently invite the need of every feature under the sun, we constantly try to figure how to use and reuse art and code in order to keep costs manageable and testing under control. Continue reading
Over on Game Matters, Scott Miller has started a good thread discussing why Ico didn’t sell, despite it being considered a work of wonder by everyone whose tried it. Idlenews has a similar thread about Psychonauts, a game that appears to be doing abysmal numbers despite being beloved by anyone that’s tried it. The latter was closer to my heart — I only dabbled in Ico, but I’m now nearly done with Psychonauts, and I’m loving every minute of it (well, up until I get jumping-puzzled out for the night). Both threads are good, albeit depressing, reads. Continue reading
I like to read the articles on Magic: the Gathering’s website from time to time, since it’s nice to see how another industry happens to handle a ‘live’ game environment. I found this one amusing, since it talks about all of the different rules and platitudes we come up with, and how the Vision ™ can stray from day to day.
[S]o we changed our minds. We do that a lot. I know Mark Rosewater and I both like to write about all these little rules and guidelines that R&D makes for ourselves and how those rules guide our philosophies and decisions. Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: those rules and guidelines tend to apply fully the day they were created, a little less the next day, then a little less, and so on, until we’ve changed our minds completely.
True, true. The end result is that my blog history is full of me contradicting myself.
Slashdot points out that White Wolf has abandoned their ill-advised money grab to anyone attempting to play a tabletop game. Widespread outrage amongst their community was a driving factor.
Really, if you want more money from each of your customers, is it really too complicated to give them something of value in return?
The recent hullabaloo about a sex game in GTA: SA brings to mind an experience I had on Meridian 59. We got angry mail threatening to sue us because, and I stress I’m not making this up, someone decrypted a file in their Meridian 59 and found it was full of every possible profanity you can think of, stuff that’d make a sailor blush. The file, of course, was the index we used for the profanity filter. Continue reading
A skater named Danny Way has successfully jumped the great wall of China. Expect this to be a level in every skateboarding, snowboarding and BMX game made in the next five years. Continue reading
It’s a common trend in games, nowadays, to figure out how to pick up the gamer and shake him for loose change. And I foresee a backlash. Among the recent news:
- Everquest increased it’s price to $14.99 in June. Similarly, Ultima Online increased it’s price to $12.99 in 2003. Both were originally below the $10 dollar mark.
- On Slashdot today, White Wolf has decided any Vampire games with a price tag owes WW a cut – even, some rules lawyers claim, if the ‘price tag’ is money collected for the pizza guy.
- Emboldened by wacky Korean games, Microsoft and Sony are both jumping over themselves to make micropayments a key part of the next console generation – even though, if you listen to most of their plans, it sounds like they want to ship half a game for full price, and expect you to buy the other half.
- The makers of Sin using the episodic format to create a game that would, once completed, possibly be the most expensive First Person Shooter ever.
Want to know what it’s really like to be part of a small game development studio? See this remarkable diary that talks about a company called Ninja Theory building a game for a next generation game platform – from the business perspective of pitching the product, paying the bills and landing the deal. They talk about how agonizing and scary the whole process is, even though every publisher that saw the game loved it. In particular, his interactions with the publishers are just priceless. Continue reading
Moby Blaster is a Shockwave Arkanoid clone , but you can make your own maps and mail them to your friends. Pretty neat and tidy, although I wish it’d chased further the promise of player created content (such as being able to play people’s maps at random and rank them).
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