May 17, 2012
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time.
May 13, 2012
Is the greatest zombie-themed game ever a mod? Rockpapershotgun, PCGamer and Kotaku think it just might be. Day Zero is a an open-world co-op permadeath zombie survival game set in the 235 square kilometer world of Arma 2. A comprehensive primer is available on the Something Awful forums (membership may be required for that link), and you can grab a copy of the work in progress here.
May 10, 2012
Walden The Game sounds thoreau-ly interesting. I am so, so, so sorry. [via]
May 6, 2012
Notch of Minecraft fame says "EA releases an 'indie bundle'? That's not how that works, EA. Stop attempting to ruin everything, you bunch of cynical bastards. Indies are saving gaming. EA is methodically destroying it. The games in the bundle are good, I'm not questioning them. I'm questioning EA" on Twitter.
Minecraft in Minecraft: Mineception. [Download]
May 3, 2012
Taylor Clark’s recent Atlantic essay quotes the somewhat annoying Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) saying
There's no nice way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they’re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they’re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb.
Brainy Gamer would like to differ. Here's their catalog of 365 smart games.
Words and Physics is a short, clever little Flash game where you have to remove the words "REMOVEME" from the screen by physically manipulating them with other words.
May 2, 2012
It turns out to be really hard for me to walk by a seam of coal or iron and not mine it, though I have more of each than I’m going to need for some time to come ... This impulse to thrift comes from both early in-game shortage and real-life training. And playing in a world of abundance (which Minecraft is) makes the problem worse in many ways: there are so many opportunities to acquire. There is so much to hoard.
May 1, 2012
"And if you have donated to a Kickstarter-funded project, you’ve just put yourself in the worst possible position as a stakeholder. Because, after all, you are at the very bottom rung of the financier ladder, with no leverage, no creative control, no operational control, and win, lose or draw, you have absolutely no way of ensuring any form of return-on-investment."
April 29, 2012
PlayMapsCube is a tilt-to-roll marble game using 3-D data from Google Maps. If your computer's anything like mine, it'll make smoke come out of your speakers, but it's pretty cool. It's a 'Chrome experiment' but it seems to run OK on Firefox 12, as well.
April 28, 2012
We're about to run the greatest con game in the history of the multiverse and you are the bottleneck. Cave Johnson on the Perpetual Testing Initiative.
April 27, 2012
April 25, 2012
War of the Roses I have a serious preference for melee games (big fan of Rune, and more recently, Mount and Blade). I just heard about War of the Roses, which looks to be my new favorite slashing experience on my computer.
April 23, 2012
A profile of Jenova Chen, designer of Journey. "There's this assumption in video games that if you run into a random player online, it's going to be a bad experience," he continues. "You think that they will be an asshole, right?"
April 22, 2012
The always-amusingly-cranky Charlie Brooks notes that some people are gay in space and suggests that sad homophobes just get over it. [via]
April 21, 2012
The Valve Handbook for New Employees (2012) (pdf link).
April 20, 2012
When game designer Trey Reyher reached out for help with the monolith puzzle driving him up the wall, he contacted a friend who had worked on Fez. He received an disheartening reply: "Good luck with that. It's practically impossible." (spoilers, obvs)
April 19, 2012
John Walker’s at Rockpapershotgun writes about the immature content of so many games, and Joseph Hilgard responds that we’re looking in the wrong places for maturity.
If we want our games to provide us with real nourishment, I would argue that the last thing we need is last year’s shooter wrapped in some awkward story about love and loss, or yet another indie platformer about the inevitability of mortality. We don’t need superficially serious themes. We need new and interesting games which provide novel and challenging forms of play.
April 18, 2012
The Chronicles of Tanelorn -- Crafting a Community in Minecraft "There is a lot going on in an RP server like Tanelorn, more than I ever imagined. Over six months I saw—and learned—a lot about the future of Minecraft. This is a game that was meant to evolve, and that evolution is speeding up every day." [more inside]
April 16, 2012
Skyrim is a nation of 10 million. Vote wonderchicken for president!
The Republia Times -- you are the editor of a state-run newspaper, and your task is to increase the government's poll ratings—or else. Flash game via.
April 14, 2012
MMMMMM is Increpare's extra-puzzly reconfiguration of Terry Cavanagh's gravity platformer VVVVVV. If you play one game today in your web browser, I highly recommend it be this one. [more inside]
Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing "I’ve worked at Microsoft, I’ve worked at Id, and I’ve worked at RAD Game Tools. They’ve all been interesting, they’ve all been great learning experiences, and some of them have been truly remarkable places. In short, I’ve seen a lot of what tech has to offer.
Valve is different."
April 11, 2012
Pongs (browser game, Flash) is Pippin Barr's exploration of a tiny corner of the game design universe: 36 Pong variants, many of them novel.
The idea to beat FreeCell sprang from a message posted by sci.math regular Russell Turpin on July 24, 1994, with the definitive title "FreeCell is NOT always winnable." In his message, Turpin provided an example of an unwinnable FreeCell deal and asked fellow group members to help prove or disprove his gripe...Turpin’s proof-of-concept hand was indeed unwinnable, but it also wasn’t one of the 32,000 included in FreeCell—possibly for that reason...Ring had made up his mind. They would try to solve FreeCell. All 32,000 hands of it.
April 9, 2012
All they want to do is laugh. And murder. "Robots kill all humans. That’s the rule. When artificial intelligence rises up, humanity should run for the hills, Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws be damned." Drew Toal looks at a pair of games that feature artificial-intelligence bots with a penchant for wit and a taste for homicide.
MMO Asteroids without the April Fools' joke! And, also, without asteroids. "Built on a Sunday afternoon using a super awesome API."
April 8, 2012
Prolific indie author Increpare has released two new Flash games today: Crab Planet is a bit like minesweeper, but the player is embodied within the game board and the mines might be moving. Coca T is a bit like pick-up sticks, but focused more on the vertices than the lines. Both leave their game-logic up to the player to suss out.
April 4, 2012
"The Hyperadictive, Time-Sucking, Relationship Busting, Mind-Crushing Power and Allure of Silly Digital Games:" an upcoming NYTimes magazine cover article, whose recently posted web version includes a nifty HTML5 "game."
April 3, 2012
"Hi, I'm Notch, and this is my new game. It's going to be a space game, and it's quite ambitious!" The game will be an MMO -- possibly with monthly fees -- and include "a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish." [more inside]
April 2, 2012
The Gameological Society is a new site hived off from the AVClub.
Better with age: a history of Epic Games How Epic Games went from being the underdog based in a garage to one of the most successful game development studios on the planet. Also, many pictures of Cliffy B.
March 30, 2012
Fancy yourself some sort of capitalist? Want an excuse to use your MBA? Just like growing and selling fruit? Then give Economies of Scale a shot, you maybe should! Participate in one or another niche of a production/wholesale/retail economy! Buy low, sell high! Corner the market on pineapples! Free, web-based biz wonk fun for everyone.
Distellamap: Visualizations of Atari 2600 game code by Ben Fry. Assembly code is presented in columns, with curved lines drawn to show the paths of any code jump instructions. By plotting raw data as filled in blocks for 1s and empty blocks for 0s, you can see the game images directly. (Zoom in to the right side of the Adventure code to see the famous "Created by Warren Robinett" easter egg text images.)
March 29, 2012
Jordan Mechner, developer of the original Prince of Persia, thought the source code had been lost. Apparently, he has discovered the 3.5-inch Apple ProDOS floppy disks containing the code in a package he received from his father, and has pledged to share it once he can transfer it into a "21-century-readable format."
Make No Wonder is a new HTML5-based game where you explore and disrupt a procedurally-generated wilderness landscape, from Matthew Hollett. [via, via]
EA Astroturfer outs himself? Given the reddity-4channiness, it might just some guy trolling 4 lulz, but the story doesn't seem all that unlikely, or in any way beyond the swirling crap-vortex that is EA.
March 28, 2012
From Parody to Production: How @petermolydeux inspired a wacky weekend game design marathon. @PeterMolydeux is a Twitter parody account that takes Black & White and Fable designer Peter Molyneux's penchant for ambitious, industry-changing game concepts to ridiculous extremes, with ideas like turn-based fighting games where you "have to level up individual bones and set which order the joints are moved and rotated to create attacks", ultra-realistic co-op military shooters where "if your partner dies you have to spend 30 minutes digging a hole to bury them before you can continue." [more inside]
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