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.
- Medal of Honor Preview | Eurogamer
The average Tier One - sorry, I forgot, none of them are average - is somewhere on the windswept crags of a lonely mountain range, probably disguised as a shepherd, and sporting an amazing beard.
Beards and goats: unlikely as it seems, that's what makes Medal of Honor seem pretty exciting. It doesn't appear to be a glitzy neo-con fantasy. It hasn't redrawn conflicts to make the enemies more old school and simplistic - "Phew, it's only the Russians again" - and it seems to want to deliver something other than vivid spectacle as it tells its story.
- Perfect Dark Review | Xbox 360 | Eurogamer
And they really are, too. This is, as Kevin McCloud might say while wandering around a modernist cottage hewn out of the clanking guts of an old tyre factory, a sympathetic update. 4J has aimed to present a classic game in the way that you remember it, rather than the way it actually was. (On the N64 in particular, there's often a gaping chasm between rosy recollection and the juddering, artefacted reality.)
- Transformers: War for Cybertron shows how it all began
Cybertron isn't just the homeworld of the Transformers... it is a Transformer itself. It was the first Transformer. In War for Cybertron you get to explore the Civil War between the Autobots and the Decepticons as they blast their way across the planet. At GDC we were treated to a long demo of the game, and yes, it looks good.
The characters were given all-new designs, and some of them will in fact be made into toys. The game takes place before Optimus gains his "Prime" designation, and shows his early days of gaining the trust of the Autobots; we get to see just how he learned to be a leader on the battleground. On the flip side of things, the game explores how Megatron met Star Scream. "We also explore why Megatron keeps this guy, who is basically a back-stabber, around," we're told. This game is taking the Transformers lore back to basics, and filling in some serious holes.
- Top Ten Mondays: The Games That Killed Their Creators - Kombo.com
- Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service to Mac | GameLife | Wired.com
It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.
The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time.
- vector poem » Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom
Doom feels more like 1st person Robotron than a modern FPS
When you play Doom today, it doesn’t feel much like you’re controlling a human or moving through real spaces. Try this though: press the TAB key, type IDDT twice and pretend you’re playing Geometry Wars, and the moving triangles are your enemies. This is what Doom’s designers were working from in 1993 – back then, the idea of a first person shooter was barely established, and their closest models for many mechanics were from 2D shooters like Robotron, Berserk and Tempest. This approach echoes throughout Doom’s design. The notion of realism in FPS design wouldn’t appear for another few years, and many decisions were made simply on the basis of being good for abstract shooter gameplay.
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- Crowdstar launches rapid expansion to gain ground in Facebook games | VentureBeat
Crowdstar came out of nowhere last fall to become one of the biggest game publishers on Facebook. Now it plans on holding onto that position with a rapid expansion.
Jeff Tseng, co-founder of the Burlingame, Calif.-based startup, said in an interview at the company’s cramped offices that it will likely expand from 40 employees now to more than 100 by the end of the year.
“I was frustrated in consoles,” Tseng said. “Everything you thought you knew about users was theoretical. You only had one chance every couple of years to try out your theory.”
- Snowmobiles are for sissies: a review of Bad Company 2
In one tense standoff I was pinned inside a house, fire coming from nearly every angle. My solution? I threw a grenade behind me, blew a hole through the wall, and exited, flanking my adversaries.
Special note should be paid to the sound design of the game. The first Bad Company featured strong sound, but Bad Company 2 sounds even better. The guns crack, buildings explode, and you can listen closely to hear where the tanks are. Be sure to turn on the "War Tapes" audio selection from the options; it's not going to be for everyone, but it certainly turns up the intensity. Wait until you get into a shotgun fight in an enclosed space, it's just as amazing to hear as it is to see.
- Gravity Hook HD - coming soon!
- Anyone use the newest PS2 Emulator released in Jan? [Archive] - TribalWar Forums
Dolphin-emu - News (http://www.dolphin-emu.com/news.php) is the Dolphin emu. Yes, you have to sign up on for their site to download, and they have a good compatibility list there. I've played Metroid Prime and Smash Brothers Brawl and I generally get about 40-60fps on a core i7/gtx 280.
PCSX2 has a good compatibility list as well, and I recommend checking youtube to see people's videos of playing the games and check the settings. The only game I've played is Gran Turismo 4 which I'm having crashes with, but while it does run it goes about 40 fps. MGS and Tekken probably work much better. The real key to getting the games to run is figuring out how to set all of the 60+ settings to try to make them work best.
So Wii/gamecube emulation is basically perfect with only a few major games still unsupported, while Ps2 emulation is still in the early stages and you may have to work hard to get your game running. Also, don't touch any of these emulators without at least a high-end dualcore /
- Shadow of the Colossus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ueda wished the game to have a unique presentation[5] and change how both players and developers perceived the idea of what bosses should be in video games. To achieve this, he ensured that the game's only enemies would be the sixteen colossi, that they could only be approached one at a time, and that they would have various behavior patterns.[45][46] Though limiting the presence of enemies to only bosses was partly intended to differentiate the game from others, Ueda also expressed that it was to ensure that the programmers' focus was entirely on the colossi so that their quality would be as high as possible.[6] In accordance with this focus upon the colossi—and his preference for simple controls—he intended that one button on the game controller be used solely for targeting the colossi during battles.
- At 1600 feet tall, He's quite possibly the biggest boss in the history of video games. [PIC]
- Space Harvest - Daft Real-Time Strategy for iPod Touch & iPhone!
- Play Passage in 10 seconds, a free online game on Kongregate
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