Tech Evangelist Joey deVilla's blog on startup life and ecommerce/mobile/web development
Oh, how I enjoy Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s game reviews in his video series Zero Punctuation. In this installment, he covers (and savages) Will Wright’s long-awaited game, Spore. Thankfully, he skips complaining about the DRM, which I heard plenty about already. After hearing his review, DRM sounds like the least of the game’s problems…
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Some of my coworkers at b5 were all hot-and-bothered about the demo for the XBox 360 game Too Human, so I decided to download it and give it a try. I played it and was generally less than impressed with both the gameplay and especially the storyline (like Assassin’s Creed, the story’s a rather clumsy mish-mash of swords-and-sorcery and sci-fi genres).
Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, the fast-trash-talking host of the excellent videogame review show Zero Punctuation agrees with me. He panned the game in his trademark fashion:
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Can you identify the ’80s-era games depicted in Scott Campbell’s piece, Great Showdowns (of the 8-bit Era)?
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Here’s something for gamers who want to go big: the Cineplex chain of movie theatres in Canada is renting out downtime at 29 of its locations to people who want to play XBox 360 games on their giants screens. CDN$179 (US$169) gets you and 11 of your friends 2 hours’ worth of big screen time.
Here’s an excerpt from the CBC article:
Theatres will generally have about 12 to 24 hours of available downtime a week, mostly in the morning, she said. Many theatres are in “full grind” right now showing summer movies, but they should slow down and have more available time once school begins in September.
Theatres may also stay open late into the evening to accommodate groups, at the discretion of each manager.
“If they wanted to book a four-hour window, we could certainly go later in the evening,” [Pat Marshall, Cineplex's vice-president of communications] said. “If the theatre manager has the staffing, they could go till two in the morning.”
The wife is a big Rock Band aficionado. Maybe I could book something for her birthday…
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A sign that I may have woken up in a parallel universe: Paramount Pictures has snapped up the rights to make a film — tentatively titled Atari — about the life of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. Leonardo DiCaprio will play the title role.
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Last week, I finished Grand Theft Auto IV. All in all, I’d have to say that it wasn’t as difficult — and definitely nowhere near as out-and-out throw-your-console-out-the-window frustrating as its predecessor Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This is fine by a casual player like me, who got in a few hours’ playing every week, with one marathon Sunday afternoon. Now it’s time to take the online multiplayer part of the game for a spin.
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Game Design Essentials: 20 Atari Games is a long (23 pages!), thorough but incredibly fascinating look at games from the time when Atari mattered as a videogame company. Back when they were something, they weren’t afraid to bust out of the genres of the time, take chances and come up with some innovative, experimental and sometimes mind-bending games with unique touches, right down to that unmistakable bell sound whenever you inserted a coin into the machine.
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What if Grand Theft Auto IV had come out in 1990, for the NES? The ad would probably look like this:
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“In the past, Grand Theft Auto has been severely criticized for being too violent,” says Conan O’Brien. “Well, the new version — I got it yesterday and was playing with it — it’s been toned down a lot. I’m not sure it’s better…”
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Here’s the only way that the game Portal could be improved: by adding Chrostopher Walken to the mix!
Click the picture to see an even larger version!
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Here’s a first in a series of regular updates on the just-released and much-awaited Grand Theft Auto IV…
In some of the dialogue between Niko and Roman, they switch between English and (I’m assuming here) Serbian. The bits in Serbian are asides that aren’t crucial to the story and can be inferred from context, but if you really want to feel like Niko, you’d like to know what they’re saying, right?
The solution is simple: just turn on subtitles (you can do this from the Game menu). When they speak in Serbian, the English translation will appear in grey text.
For those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to try out GTA IV, here’s another video showing the next 10 minutes of gameplay (the video showing the first ten minutes is here), featuring:
Here’s something from Fargo’s Thought for the Day, which is included in GameSpy Daily, an email newsletter from GameSpy:
Thoughts on Sandbox Games
Since around the time that Grand Theft Auto 3 and The Sims came out, the phrase “sandbox game” or “open world” has seeped into gaming literature and even into marketing speak. It kinda drives me nuts, because a “sandbox” in and of itself isn’t very fun. It’s easy to screw it up.
Ask any game designer and they’ll tell you: if you put a person in an open world, where they can do anything they want, they spend a few minutes testing the limits and then he or she will get bored. The real trick to these games is to provide a lot of directed gameplay even if people don’t realize it. The object of an open world is to let the player set his or her own agenda, and then to provide tons of cool gameplay once they decide what to do. Sims 2 is a great example: you can do whatever you want, but no matter what decisions you make for your characters, you’ll always run across interesting mini-games or tough decisions to make in order to accomplish your goal.
Of course the Grand Theft Auto games have an overall story that you can work through via a series of directed missions, but even when you go “off the rails” and start freestyling in the sandbox world, you’re never far from the guiding hand of a designer encouraging you to collect something, discover something, set a new record, kick off a minigame, etc. Few design teams can do an open world right — but when they get it right, the experience is spectacular.
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Grand Theft Auto IV Goes Out at Midnight! Games stores all over Toronto are opening for an hour at midnight to sell the hotly-anticipated and universally praised next installment of the Grand Theft Auto series of games. If you’re in the Toronto area, all Future Shops and EB Games will be open at midnight, as will the Yonge/Dundas Best Buy. For more on the game, check out the IGN Review and the GameSpy review.
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It’s out! Not Duke Nukem Forever, but its teaser trailer.
As I was watching the video, I kept thinking: Where’s the one liner?! I want the one-liner! Don’t worry. there’s one at the end.
Click here to see the video on its YouTube page.
If you want to get a higher-quality version of the video, this entry in the 3D Realms blog has all the details.
The question remains: will the game finally get released, and after all this time, will anyone care?
For those of you who’ve forgotten, here’s the trailer from Duke Nukem Forever, which was released at E3 1998:
Click here to see the video on its YouTube page.
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Image taken from 3D Realms.
Here’s what the folks at 3D Realms have to say:
Last Saturday we had our annual company Christmas party. It was a lot of fun as usual but it featured one special surprise. It turns out that several people had been secretly working late nights and into the wee hours of the morning preparing a special video for those at the party. They created a short teaser for Duke Nukem Forever.
After seeing the teaser we thought it was something we should share with all of you and while it’s just a teaser, rest assured more is coming.
Tomorrow, Wednesday the 19th, around noon CST, we will release the first teaser trailer from Duke Nukem Forever.
Well, this should be interesting…
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I love this Photoshop job in which Rapture (the setting of the game BioShock) propaganda replaces the standard “Do not leave child unattended” message on grocery shopping carts:
The line is derived from the philosophy of game character Andrew Ryan (whose name and backstory are rearrangements of Ayn Rand). You hear it in an in-game recording in Ryan’s own voice:
I am Andrew Ryan, and I’m here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone.
I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible.
I chose…Rapture.
A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
If you’re looking for a gift for someone with an XBox 360 or a PC with enough horsepower to play modern first-person shooter games, you might want to consider BioShock as a gift. It’s an excellent game that blends gaming action with a very rich backstory — quite possibly the richest since Myst. Better still, it’s can be finished in an amount of time that still lets you have a life: at the “easy” level, I finished it in a about a week, playing a couple of hours a day, and I’m a relatively casual gamer.
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