games
Entries tagged with “games”.
Rube Goldberg machines are fun, as anyone who has seen The Goonies will tell you. Physical machines, such as the meticulous, elegant design built for the award-winning Honda ad “Cog” (which required 606 takes to get right), cost millions of dollars and take months of work to film.
A recent trend on the web is the building of virtual Rube Goldberg machines, using existing video game engines to supply the components and physics, and essentially developing their own emergent gameplay. Half Life 2, with its included Havok physics, has an entire community working on building various exceedingly complicated contraptions that do very little, by tying together various blocks, pulleys and the ubiquitous exploding barrel. For my money, the finest examples of the art have come from the venerable Super Mario World.
- Currently Listening to:
- Bernard Fanning — Songbird
So Christmas arrived, and I managed to secure a Nintendo Wii (thanks Nikky). I’ve been a crazy Nintendo fan ever since that fateful day I got my first NES back in about 1989. I shamelessly wear geeky Mario-emblazoned t-shirts and have engaged in countless fruitless “which console is better” debates with friends and enemies. Shigeru Miyamoto is an idol of mine. And every new Nintendo console has been a special occasion.
Mark receives the thrashing of a lifetime!
Wii Sports is the very definition of a “killer app.” On the surface so simple, but containing surprising levels of depth and nuance. Once a friend has hit their first home run or cross-court volley, they’re hooked, and in most cases, go home wanting one. A number of times now a friend has taken a break from flailing their arms around to remark, wide eyed, things like “It’s amazingly accurate”, and “The speaker in the controller is a really good idea!”. Yes. I know.
While chasing my dog around today I was marvelling at her natural instincts to want to run around the whole time. It’s a game for her, and probably her favourite thing to do apart from tearing the house to shreds. The developing problem we’ve got as a species is that we got too goddamned good at building things that are even funner than basic locomotion. The Wii is a very smart move back in the opposite direction.
Video game music: not just kid stuff is one of my favourite papers from a few years back, because it is arguing for something that I have long believed: writing music for devices with limited sound processing capabilities involves a different way of thinking about the composition. To play some sound effects on the NES, you had to momentarily disable the background music’s percussion channel (this channel itself being made up of intermittent bursts of static). I’ve always found it more interesting to design within restrictions (or “engaging constraint”), which I suppose is one of the resons I was attracted to web design all those years ago.
Will Wright’s new game, Spore, looks like an amazing project. Wright, the designer of both The Sims and before that, Sim City, approaches game design in a refreshing, thoughtful way that is rarely seen (or more probably, rarely documented) in the games industry. His talk at the Game Developer’s Conference, where Spore was first demoed, is instructive, entertaining and exciting.
- Metroid: Other M Video Game, Review | Video Clip | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com
- YouTube - X-Men Arcade - 6 players Playthrough [1/4]
- What Has Been Your Biggest Gaming Letdown?
- In Pictures: 20 Of Our Favorite PC Game Mods
- GT Wish List Video Game, Beyond Good & Evil 2 | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com
- Top 10 Expensive Games
The Price to make Video Games is Increasing! Some on this list are equal to a high budget movie!
- How Fast Should We Play Games?
For the most part, games on early consoles were more focused on challenging the player's dexterity as opposed to telling a story, i.e. Contra, Mega Man, and Battletoads. The goal was to get from beginning to end swiftly and skillfully while racking up as many points as possible. Players rarely cared about game length, because length wasn't figured into quality – if it was a good game, it was a good game. If it was bad, it was bad. You never hear anyone complain that Super Mario Bros. 3 was too short.
- Video Game Bosses - Television Tropes & Idioms
- Chrono Trigger DS Review - Nintendo DS Review at IGN
I've touched on the idea that there are two "Square Enix" companies out there and this is another perfect example of that. On one hand, you've got the Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy IV, The World Ends With You publisher mentality, where the company is aggressively remaking classic games, pushing original content, and cleaning up because of it. On the other hand, you've got the still very successful, still very quality-driven publisher strategy, which games like Front Mission 1st , Dragon Quest IV, and the now Chrono Trigger remake take, using 95% of a game already finished (or a basic port away from), and then delivering it repackaged to a new crowd of gamers. That doesn't stop these games from being any better quality-wise, but it certainly drops the incentive for returning buyers that have been with Square since the beginning, played it all before, and are now wondering why they're paying top dollar for a game they had over a decade back.
- A Winner Is You - Television Tropes & Idioms
Let's say you have been through this incredibly long and Nintendo Hard game in one sitting (because you can't save and don't have passwords), until you finally finish the game and defeat the last, incredibly hard boss. The moment of truth has come, you wait for the epic, satisfying ending and you get...
"Conglaturation!" on a black background, in perfect silence, and nothing more (except maybe the credits). If you're really unlucky, it'll be the same Game Over screen you'd get for dying. And then, after three seconds, the title screen again. They could have at least spell-checked it.
- Xen Syndrome - Television Tropes & Idioms
A subtrope to That One Level, and the gameplay/design equivalent of A Winner Is You to some degree. You can be playing a great game, things are building up to the climax and you can only imagine how awesome it could be with how great everything before was, then the game goes to hell (sometimes literally), such that it almost seems like it was outsourced to another, far less competent developer for the final levels. The game is suddenly full of crappy levels, bland scenery, horrible stealth and escort missions, Trial And Error Gameplay around every corner, badly placed checkpoints, interminable backtracking (and general blatant filler), and maybe a dashing of That One Boss. The climax should be everything great from before and more, yet in this case it leaves you with a very bad taste at the end of a great (or even average) game.
- Psychonauts | The First Hour
- That One Boss - Television Tropes & Idioms
- ScrewAttack Video Game, Video Game Vault: Felix The Cat | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com
- Passage game review
Passage is not a game that tries to be art for art’s sake: it is a game that is trying to help a medium and an industry make the smallest budge towards being significant. It returns to pixel art, low resolution, and basic controls because we never asked how those first building blocks could be used in significant ways, to express emotion and convey meaning. We have been so eager to advance our graphical prowess, and sometimes our mechanics, that we never stopped to think about meaning at all. So the place to make the attempt at creating meaningful interactive artworks is not with a multimillion-dollar 3D world and all the latest technology and gizmos: such an attempt would be doomed from the start because it would be using shoddy building blocks that were all shine and no substance. Rather, the place that we must start is back at the beginning: we must return to the first building blocks and ask how we can build substance from the ground up, so that later generations might have giant 3
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