This week has been hectic at the office this week, with a project approaching deadline (nothing gaming related, unfortunately)… It’s a weird project, since it’s web based and we’re using a mixture of PHP/JSON on the server side and GWT/JSON/Java on the client… since I’m new to these technologies, it has been an uphill fight, but it’s been rewarding in its own way…
Anyway, so I don’t get complaints about lack of posts, I’m just sharing some links with you guys:
First off, a game called “Cubesome”… Similar to “Exit”, it’s a platformer that you play on the surface of a cube, with parts of the level in each side; it seems fun:
Also, I found an interesting project for all of those that (like me) like to watch screenshots of games in development… It’s called “Screenshot Saturday”, and it’s a collection of screenshots, extracted from Tweeter feeds that feature the word “#screenshotsaturday” on them, grouped by weeks… You can access the site at http://screenshotsaturday.pekuja.com/. It doesn’t seem to work on IE9, but works fine on Firefox or Chrome…
Finally, I found an interesting tutorial on creating pixel art, which is great for people who lack artistic skill like myself… it gives some really nice pointers on how to improve that programmer art! You can check that out at http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_almighty_grass_tile.php, and following the links…
And that’s it for today… 🙂
I’ll try to have some free time to put up some more stuff this week, but we’ll see…
I don’t usually get too excited about physics-based puzzlers, since I find them to be too finicky. But this one is interesting, since it plays with gravity. The idea is that objects of different colours get pulled by gravity in a different direction. For example, blue stuff might fall down, but green objects fall up. There is also objects that change the color of the affected object, for added effect and more creative puzzles. An interesting one, check out the video below:
This one is a very neat idea; I loved the first one. Basically, you have to reorganize the “level grid” to allow your character to progress… The usual assortment of keys and doors mechanics, associated to a fresh perspective and a clean aesthetic.
An interesting game for mobile platforms… I like ambitious games in these kind of platforms, instead of row-upon-row of puzzle games. This one is a 3d RPG, with controls that seem (from what I could gather) nice in this kind of environment (multitouch). I like the 3d graphics, very angular and such (I’m guessing for artistic and performance reasons).
I love rogue-like games… This one has the interesting variation that is balanced towards 10-minute games, which might make it viable for short breaks (and even for mobile platforms). Although this isn’t exactly a “rogue-like”, since it uses low-res retro graphics instead of the usual ASCII, it’s close enough for me to put it in the same category.
Ambition – Check; Co-op – Check; Procedurally-generated – Check. This game has everything I like, and looks good aswell!
This is a dungeon crawler (much in the vein of Diablo), with the possibility of co-op (which sadly not many games have).
Soldak Entertainment are no newcommers to indy game development, they’ve been at it since 2004, with 3 interesting titles already released (all RPGs, including this one), and it shows, since every game it’s been better polished than the previous one; and if there’s an important thing for an indy nowadays, to be able to stand out in a saturated market, is polish, polish, polish…
First things first: this game looks absolutely gorgeous! It’s a mix of tower defense and action-RPG, in which they have to defend the castle against a horde of enemies, using not only their quick reflexes, but also traps and defenses. Don’t know if this will work in practive (it’s two very different games, that are targeted at very different people), but the ideia is nice.
Oh, and did I mention that it looks absolutely lovely?! 🙂
Following the success of games like Farmville (maybe I’m being unfair, but that’s what comes to mind when I look at this one), this games puts you in charge of a virtual farm… but it’s much more complex than Farmville, having to manage work groups, seasons, different plantations, etc… It’s a tycoon game, but with cattle and crops!
This is another game that shows that even the simplest game concept can be extended further by creative thinking and polish…
This platformer has the interesting idea of instead of bestowing on the character special powers, it enables him to use the enemies in the game to help him progress; for example, he can grab a creature that makes him jump higher or further.
Graphically, the style is a bit confusing for my taste, but it has lots of work put into it.
This game seems to be totally awesome… a turn-based tactical game with a kind of “virtual reality” visual to it… The neat part about it is that all the turn takes effect at the same time, so you give instructions to all your team members, and then press go and see them execute, which demands a more tactical approach to the scenarios, since it’s harder to react to changing circumstances (so you have to plan to avoid sticky situations).
Terrible name, though…
And that’s it for this week’s coverage of the IGF games… next week we’ll have more, I hope!
Was intending to write the second part of my IGF2011 analysis, but didn’t have time because of silly bugs on the shadow systems… The code that chose either the “front” or “back” shadowmap (for my dual paraboloid shadow maps) was wrong, and it took me forever to see where the problem was…
Anyway, completed the distortion buffer work… still have some issues “controlling” the effect, but it will have to wait for the artist to put his hand on it to see exactly what is the best course of action for this…
Hopefully I’ll have a bit more time tomorrow and will be able to post my initial plan…
Haven’t updated this with news on what I’m doing for a while…
Well, my life is a bit boring at the moment, working on some projects for my day job… the rest of my time I’ve been working on my deferred renderer for my yet-secret project…
First up, I’ve added a decal system, which looks pretty sweet… With it, I intend to add some variety to the game areas:
This works by extracting the geometry affected by the decal (using a clipping algorithm against the decal bounding box). Then this geometry is drawn onto the G-Buffer, which means that the decal is correctly affected by the lighting of the scene. Since there are too many permutations of the shaders used to affect the G-Buffer, I’ve built a small tool that auto-generates the shaders, according to what you want to modulate, etc.
In the examples above:
Overriding just the color component of the G-Buffer
Overriding the color and normal component
Overriding the color and normal, and halving the specular power/gloss components
Overriding the color and normal, and nullifying the specular power/gloss components
This has the drawback that this kind of decals don’t affect alpha objects, which is a separate pass. The rationale behind it is that there are other techniques that can be used in those particular cases, and lighting of the alpha objects is done through a multipass lighting system.
Second, I added the alpha object rendering system:
The renderer uses the standard multipass renderer I’ve had in Spellbook in the past. This pass is also used if we want to use different kinds of lighting models besides the standard Phong one. This is a completely separate pass, which doesn’t affect the G-Buffer (and hence doesn’t write to the depth buffer render target, only to the standard Z-Buffer). Alpha objects are rendered back to front, and can’t have emissive component (that can be simulated with pre-multiplied alpha).
Finally, I just added a Depth-of-Field effect:
On this video, the most visible effect is changing the focal distance. The effect is done by rendering a blurred version of the rendered scene and by lerping between the blurred and not-blurred version, based on depth (or more precisely, the difference between the depth and the focal distance, considering the focal range).
Next step on this renderer is the screen space distortions, to use with explosions and stuff, which is simple to execute but hard to control from an artistic standpoint.
Besides all this techy stuff (which is really fun for me!), I’ve been playing stuff (as usual):
Trying to get the “Loremaster” achievement done before Cataclysm comes out. It’s fun revisiting some of the early areas, and seeing some of the lore I missed on vanilla WoW… Drawback is wondering all the time “how did I loose so much time playing this, these areas are awful!”.
Finished this one… I was pleasently surprised by it… I was never a huge fan of Transformers (even when I was young… I’d watch it and think it’s cool, but it didn’t have that big of an impact on me as most of the nerds I know!). But it is a very competent shooter, with a nice enough storyline (just wish they added some more of “lore” onto it, like who are exactly the Primes, and what’s the story behind Optimus, since the game for a time hints at a revelation that never comes). The neat part of the game is that it’s actually fluid switching from “vehicle” mode to “giant robot” mode, with advantages in both and different types of fun (specially the flying ones). I’m giving it a 8/10.
I was really looking forward for this one, having loved the first one… and while the game itself didn’t let me down (this is exactly what fighting with the Force should feel like!), the story is one of the worse I’ve seen in the last years… paper-thin, just an excuse to move from stages to stages (kind of reminds me of the terrible narrative of “Heavenly Sword”) killing stuff… but while “Heavenly Sword” was boring and predictable (from a gameplay standpoint), FU2 is fun and engaging.
Really, if the story wasn’t so terrible, it would be one of the best games ever… but the story as it is detracts from the fun… it goes against Star Wars lore, the endings are silly (both the light side and dark side one) and the characters are as badly characterized as it is possible (well, that part is on par with the “Star Wars” movies, to be honest).
The graphics and sound are top notch (the graphics really impressed me, sometimes they deserved the name “photorealistic”), although some areas were too empty to be credible (missing clutter and “function”). And the gameplay is amazing… it’s extremely fluid going from “lightsaber fight” mode to “force-using” mode, which makes for some very neat fights, very dynamic in their approach.
This game could easily have ranked a 10/10, but since the story is so miserable, I’ll give it a 9/10. And I feel sorry for that, since the first one had a story that really compelled you and mashed well with the Star Wars lore…
And that’s it for today… Hopefully, in this week I’ll have the third installment of “Games of my Life” and the second one of “IGF2011 games”…
The Independent Game Festival (IGF) is the equivalent to the Sundance Festival for games… It honors and promotes games by independent developers (the definition of independent developer is a matter of heated debate, best left for another article), and it is not uncommon for a game that wins some of the categories to go to bigger things (publishing deals, better sales, etc).
There are 391 entrants this year, and I’ve decided to do some featured articles on the ones I found more interesting, plus an article at this series end with my thoughts of the IGF in general… Note that my analysis of these games is done on the most part by looking at the information at the IGF site. Some of these I actually delved a bit deeper, but mostly I stuck with the information provided… This has the disadvantage that I may have skipped some worthy entrants because they lacked videos or demos of their games, or that I got swindled by nifty videos! 🙂
But in an indy game, presentation is everything, since you depend on the internet’s mass-judgment to get your game out there…
So, without further ado, here’s the first part of my list (which has more than 50 games on it):
While the game presented in “A Mobius Proposal” seems to be very neat (puzzle/co-op sort of thing), the motivation for it is what actually caught my eye: the game was designed as a marriage proposal… That for itself is very cool, but the game also seems interesting, with two characters going in diferent sides of a Mobius strip, helping one another progress in the levels.
This game will either be a revolution in RTS games, or a huge failure… and it all boils down on how complex is playing around with time is.
The premise behind Achron is the same as in all RTS games, with the difference that in this one, you can go back in time with units and manipulate the events in the “present/future”. This means that you can go to the past with a unit, and destroy the facility that’s creating all the units that are currently beating the crap out of you, before they’re actually built!
Of course, this lead to paradox (if you “go back in time and destroy the factory that created the unit that you sent back in time”-sort of thing), but the way Hazardous Software is dealing with this problem is also interesting… Check out the video below for more information, it’s pretty enjoyable:
This game was developed by Frictional Games, the people that have brought you Penumbra. This one has actually been already released on Steam, and it’s already on my wish list (I’ll get to it as soon as I can find the time… lots of games to play!).
The game takes a bit of a Lovecraft vibe, in terms that you can’t actually do anything against the enemies. You just need to avoid them (because looking at them, and being around them will make you go insane over time), and try to stay in the light (since it will restore your sanity). Your character wakes up in the dungeon of a castle and doesn’t have memories, and the game is a mixture of exploration and puzzle solving, while avoiding the monsters. Pretty good atmospheric stuff, if you’re into that kind of thing.
To be honest, this game seems like standard platformer fare, but I really liked the visual style… it has an old-school pre-rendered sprites vibe to it, but vibrant colors and some humor that made me want to mention it.
This one seems one of the most interesting arcade/puzzle games on display on this years’ IGF. Looks hard as hell, though! 🙂 Basically, combine atoms to form complex molecules, according to some predefined level goal.
Beautiful is the only word that comes to mind when I look at “Bastion”. Everything in the game looks so polished and pretty it hurts… It comes from Supergiant Games, which apparently is a company founded by ex-devs of the Command & Conquer series. Seems like a huge departure from that, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing… From what I could gather, this is a isometric semi-RPG game, with some co-op (which is awesome, love that kind of game in co-op), with everything hand-drawn (which leads to the amazingly beautiful visuals!).
Another nice puzzle platformer, in this one you can draw and erase blocks for the player to stand inside… watch the video above, it does a much better job of explaining the key mechanics than me…
If you’re familiar with the indy scene, “Cave Story” (and his developer, Daisuke Amaya) isn’t a stranger to you, since it’s one of the most known titles in indy history. Although the original PC game goes back to 2004, the version on the IGF is the Wiiware version that’s been released earlier this year.
Although it is a “generic” platformer, the balancing and the gameplay makes this a title that stands way above most.
And that’s it for this first part… I’ll have part 2 up soon… Until then, you can explore the entrants yourself, or just wait for it… 🙂
Don’t forget, people, support indy games! They’re usually cheap for all the fun they have inside, and most just need some dollars/euros/qwanzas/etc so they can keep doing that!
Watched “Jonah Hex” the other day… It’s at best a “popcorn-movie”, by which I mean that you see it and then you forget it…
It keeps you entertained for a while, but doesn’t add anything of value to the genre.
“Jonah Hex” is a movie based on a DC comic. It takes place in a Western setting, and follows the story of Jonah Hex, a man with a dark past that almost died, but somehow survived, and gained the ability to talk with the dead… during the movie, he has to foil a plan to overthrow the newly-borned US government. While the premise is fine, but to be honest it doesn’t hold up the movie.
I never read the comics, so I can’t speak on how well/badly the movie reflects it, but the movie itself seems to be just a bunch of action sequences cobbled up together with some cheesy storyline. The action itself is well done, dynamic, all that you’d expect from Hollywood. The filler sequences are also what you’d expect in a Hollywood movie, thin threads to keep the audience entertained until the next action sequence (or to show off the mediocre Megan Fox… don’t get me wrong, she’s gorgeous, but a terrible actress).
The basic problem of the movie is that the “gimmick” (talking to the dead) really doesn’t shine in it, and after failing at that, the movie transforms into a “Wild Wild West”-kind of movie…
Bottom-line, the movie is entertaining, the visual style is interesting, but the story is paper-thin and the character doesn’t stand out as it should (and as I guess it does in the comics)… I’m giving it a 7/10.
The year was 1986… and a game series that for many has the best games ever was born!
I’m talking about “The Legend of Zelda” series, in it’s various incarnations… This series was the reason I bought consoles (I bought the Game Boy because of the Oracle games, the N64 because of “Ocarina of Time”, the Gamecube because of “The Wind Waker”, the DS because of “Phantom Hourglass” and the Wii because of “Twilight Princess”).
Created by Shigeru Miyamoto (almost a household name) and Takashi Tezuka, the series was always a mixture of action, light-RPG and puzzle solving game mechanics.
This game really shook (and continues to rock) my world; when I start to play a Zelda game, I can’t let it go…
Can’t exactly explain why the game appeals to me so much… the story is pretty basic (and it’s more or less always the same from game to game), the graphics aren’t top-notch, the sound is passable (except for the music, but more on that later) and the game lacks depth (for the current standards)… So why is “Legend of Zelda” so good?
It all boils down to gameplay: the puzzles are interesting, the fighting is simple yet complex enough, the controls are very good and responsive… the game immerses you in that simple fantasy world and doesn’t let it go. I think it acts on that child-like part of your brain, since the basic story/area design is very akin to a child’s story, without tons of backstory and lore to read and memorize, etc… Not saying that is normally a good thing (God knows I love a good story and rich universes!), but in the case of “Legend of Zelda”, it all comes together in a very compelling way…
And this is not me… “Legend of Zelda” games have been awarded by several websites and magazines the titles of best games of the year/ever, and no top-ten best games lists of blogs and sites everywhere can be complete without at least a “Legend of Zelda” game in it!
Although this was the first game in the series, it was the second I played… I started with “A Link to the Past”, and only later I got access to a NES and could play this one… Since I was used to the SNES graphics of “A Link to the Past”, the graphics looked terrible, but the basic playability was there (in a much simpler form)… I had fun with this, but it’s far from the brilliance of “A Link to the Past”.
As I said, this was the first Zelda game I played, back in 1991… and it was totally awesome… it was one of the games that had more impact on me, gameplay wise… I could go on for hours in what makes this game brilliant, but lots of people throughout the net can do a better job at it than me! The graphics were beautiful for the time (on par with the graphics on my Commodore Amiga) and the gameplay was amazing… it was the first game I remember playing that you would get new weapons and skills throughout the game, and that was an amazing experience… I couldn’t wait to get to the new dungeon and get new stuff, or to revisit previous ones to explore what were previously unnaccessible areas.
This was the game that made me buy a Nintendo 64… I saw this running as a demo back in 1998 on a store, and I had to buy a console and the game right away… thankfully, I still had some leftover money from my birthday almost three months before! 🙂
This was one of the few games that made a good transition from 2d to 3d, specially in such a different point of view… But everything did the transition smoothly… the lock-on mechanism made fighting easy even in 3d, the context-sensitive buttons make exploring and adventure simple, and the clean style of graphics overcame the technical limitations of the time…
Picked it up again four or five years ago, in a N64 emulator, and the game still rocks, specially in emulators that support upscaling of graphics…
These games in 2001, and were created at the same time; the story intertwines slightly at the end… In Oracle of Seasons, the player can switch between seasons of the year (winter, spring, summer, autumn), and that affects the game world to make stuff passable/impassable. In Oracle of Ages, Link can travel to different time periods, where obstacles may or may not be present.
I bought a Gameboy Color because of these games and it was a good investment (even though I didn’t play anything else in the GBC, that I can recall). Here we can again see the capacity Nintendo (with Capcom on this launch) have to innovate without effectively changing the game whatsoever, just by adding two new items that can make changes to the game world).
And why did I buy a Gamecube in 2003: this is why! The Wind Waker was an amazing game, full of all the Zelda-like traits we’ve all come to love… From an innovation standpoint, it didn’t add much to the previous 3d incarnations; it changed the graphical style to a cell shaded that first you loathe, then you love… The explosion and effects are particularly good… never before in my life I saw such cartoony effects, and they were really really really nice!
I bought the Wii to play this back in 2006… and I was quite disapointed, to be honest… It was the first Zelda game that I felt disapointed with… Not sure if I was expecting a “proper” sequel to “Ocarina of Time”, “Majora’s Mask” and “The Wind Waker”, or if the game world was too big and empty, but the game didn’t pull me in as much as the ones before… There’s nothing obviously wrong with the game, it just doesn’t have the magic of the rest…
After being disapointed and fearing for the series decline, this game restored my faith completely in 2007… I was expecting to see what the new Nintendo DS interface would do to the series (and gaming in general)… and I wasn’t disapointed! The controls are really good and intuitive, and the basic gameplay traits of Zelda are all there… one of the best I’ve played ever…
The world is the same as in “The Wind Waker”, which is great…
I liked the controls so much, that I (and the rest of Spellcaster Studios) started working on a prototype for game loosely inspired in this one… For the first time, a public demonstration of what we achieved after two weeks of work:
The Music
A note has to be done about the music in “Legend of Zelda”… while usually the music is competent and well though for the game/area in question, the main title for the series (in all it’s incarnations, from the beep/blops of the NES to the metal versions around the web) is a landmark song, known by everyone, even if they haven’t played the game… It’s one of the most catchy songs in the world…
One cool metal version:
In closing…
I’ve played all of the games in the Zelda series, some on the original consoles when they came out, others in emulators to satisfy my Link-addiction… I prefer the 2d games to the 3d game in the “The Legend of Zelda” series, but all are good (except “Twilight Princess” for some reason). The ones above are representative of one “generation” of Zelda games, and were usually my favorites (with the exception of “Ocarina of Time”, which is tied with “Majora’s Mask”).
The “Legend of Zelda” series is one of the reasons why Nintendo is currently on top of the world now, and the reason for that is apparent to anybody that actually plays the game: the games are wickedly well designed, consistent, polished, and give a sense of self-satisfaction pretty regularly (which is extremely important in this kind of games, in my opinion).
Can’t wait for “Skyward Sword” and I’ll probably buy a 3DS when it comes out to play “Ocarina of Time 3d”… if it drops the price, since it’s a pretty costly gizmo… it costs as much as an XBox 360!
Until the next time, where we’ll look at Sierra’s space-adventures “Space Quest”…
Hi guys, and welcome to what I expect to be a regular feature on my blog: “Games of my life”.
In this feature, I’ll be talking about some games that really made a difference in my life… I’m not talking of the best games I’ve ever played (although some of them are), nor the ones that had more impact in the video game world. I’m talking about games that made an impact on _me_ personally…
Why should you care? Well, to be honest, I don’t expect you to care that much, but it’s fun strolling down memory lane and see old games again… I know I had a blast doing some research for this while I was preparing the series.
So, without further ado, here is part one of the series, hope you enjoy!
Released in 1982, developed by Beam Software, “The Hobbit” was the first text adventure I’ve ever played, and it really blew my mind at the time… I’ve never read the books before this, so the story was completely new and it was very exciting to have a game telling me a story. I played it on the ZX Spectrum (a Timex 2048 machine).
You can play it online here. They even left in the time it took to render the screen like on the Spectrum…
“Elite” was a space trading game (probably the first one) created by David Braben and Ian Bell in 1984. It featured wireframe 3d graphics in the ZX Spectrum (where I played it), but it had ports in almost all machines known to man (some better, some worse… I played the Commodore Amiga version years later, and it was beautiful for the time!). It was also one of the first sandbox games, in which there weren’t any obvious objectives besides the ones you set for yourself, and it featured a procedurally generated universe to play in.
You’d go around trading stuff and defending your cargo, trying to rise higher and higher in the game hierarchy (to the coveted “Elite” title).
The game spawned a sequel in 1993, called “Frontier: Elite II” (or just “Frontier”), but for me it never captured me as much as the original… You had better graphics, and more worlds to explore (and you could even go to the surface of the planets), all generated procedurally. Most of the elements of “Elite” were also present in “Frontier”, but the game had a better, more physically corrected flight model, which was much harder to master and not as much fun (for me, at least)…
Another game from the golden age of ZX Spectrum games, “Jet Set Willy” was a sequel to “Manic Miner“. Created in 1984 by Matthew Smith (working for Software Projects), it was a step up in platformer games.
What made this game amazing for the time was the fact that it was huge, having dozens of different rooms (that could be played in non-linear fashion), with different challenges to overcome, to help Miner Willy to clean up his house after a party. It was wicked difficult (for me at least, I was 11 when I played it for the first time), and had some bugs that prevented players from finishing it if you did stuff in a certain order.
Took me ages to finish this one…
Matchpoint
Had a though time finding information on this game on the internet… Matchpoint was a tennis game created in 1984, by Sinclair Research (I think, couldn’t verify this)…
While I didn’t enjoy this one very much (not much of a sports fan), it was very important to me because it was the first game I saw on the Spectrum, the game that made me say “I want to be a game developer!”. From then onwards, most of my life choices were done around that…
The game had impressive graphics for the time (the ball even cast a shadow!!!), and it was relatively fun in two player mode (two people crouching over the small keyboard)…
Ok, that’s it for this first installement of “Games of my life”, hope you enjoyed it… Next time, I’ll be looking into the Space Quest saga and Legend of Zelda games, so stay tunned…
Watched “The Box” this weekend (among other stuff, I’ll post about it later this week).
It’s an interesting movie; it’s based on a 1970’s short story called “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, and was adapted to an episode of “Twilight Zone” in the 80’s… my final idea about the movie is that the story is much more suited to a format like “The Twilight Zone” than an actual full-lenght feature-film…
Although the movie doesn’t become “boring” per-se, it has lots of dead moments where not revelations are comming and that seems to be just re-hashing what has already gone on…
The acting is good enough, with Frank Langella being awesome as Steward (he’s super-creepy, as the character calls for it); the special effects are not cutting edge, but they do their job (some of the work in the scar on Langella’s face looks too CGI, but other than that, it’s ok).
The story revolves around a couple to which a mysterious man gives a box with a button. If they press that button, one person they don’t know will die, and they’ll get one million dollars. The movie than proceeds into analysis of human behavior and the consequences of actions.
On a final note, the movie is quite nice (a bit slow for some)… I give it a 7/10.
Later this week, don’t miss the review on “Jonah Hex”, and the introduction of new featured articles in everyone’s favorite format: lists!
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Now for the spoiler part (stop reading if you want to check out the movie):
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Really, stop reading… I’m telling you, it kind of makes the movie more boring if you know this…
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You’re really persistent, aren’t you?
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Fine, fine, have it your way…
This is all supposed to be a big test by a super-advanced race of alien beings, trying to figure out if mankind can be selfless or not. If not, they’ll destroy us all, like they did on Mars millions of years ago…
The silly part, in my opinion is the nature of the test: people seem to press the button just because they don’t actually believe in the “bad” consequence, they just don’t want to miss out on the “good” consequence, and that seems to me that it’s not a good metric of human behavior… Specially, it seems too falible to be used by a super-alien race…
Done it? Ok… What you’ve just seen is a small trailer for “Glorg: The One Button Dungeon Crawler”, and it’s a procedurally generated dungeon crawler where you use just one button to play the whole game.
While I actually don’t know how this actually translates into a fun experience in practice, I’m curious about the results…
One button games like this or “The Adventures of One Button Bob” always throw me into this kind of idea frenzy, in which I think of cool ideas for games that only use one button; although I’m not sure I could actually pull it off, thinking of games in terms of “one-button-interface” is really helpful to help focus on the game concept and removing the fluff… It’s a way for a game designer to really optimize the game actions and to see if his/her novel idea can really shift from “novelty” to “innovative”.
Comming back to the topic of my last post (the World of Warcraft pre-Cataclysm patch), it seems more obvious that Blizzard really screwed up… the game is so full of bugs now (characters that don’t log off completely, 60% speed mount when you die) and so unbalanced (mages, warlocks and DKs are completely op, while holy pallies and balance druids have been reduced to a steaming pile of crap) that players are in a general state of outcrying… if we consider that Blizzard’s revenue stream depends on players being happy and playing, this was all a dangerous move…
The thing that impresses me the most is why none of these problems came up during beta… I know people just leveled to 85 and nobody actually played at level 80 (so the balancing issues might not have been apparent), but considering this patch was schedulled for almost two months before Cataclysm (and new levelling) came about, it seems like a mistake to do a patch trying new game systems and not forcing some level 80 testing on them…
I know several people already considering rerolling (after been playing the same class for five years!!!!), or giving up the game altogether… this general state of unsatisfaction is serious from a game design/testing perspective… a lesson Blizzard will learn the hard way, I think…
Lastly, I’ve been playing “Professor Layton and the Pandora Box” on the Nintendo DS, and while the game seems to have a good concept (minigames galore to solve mysteries), the storytelling system itself is soooooooo annoying that it kind of takes the fun out of the game… The cutscenes take too long, and impart very little new knowledge about the game or the story… seems like a constant reminder of everything that’s been going on for the last 5 mins, done in awfull voice work… I feel bad, because I really like the concept of the game (a kid/puzzle version of the Mystery Case Files games from Big Fish, definite must-have games!)…
