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.
Thursday 4 Jan 2007
Posted by Ross at 11:15 PM under Blog
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- 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.
Monday 12 Jun 2006
Posted by Ross at 5:27 PM under Blog
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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.
Saturday 4 Mar 2006
Posted by Ross at 8:54 PM under Blog
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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.
- 7 things Donkey Kong Country Returns needs to be authentic | GamesRadar
- Magikarp Power - Television Tropes & Idioms
- Red Faction Guerrilla Xbox 360 Review - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
It's here that Guerrilla struggles, at least to begin with, and following those first giddy destructive sprees, the game settles into something of a rut as you battle through the first two sectors. Like most openworld games, too much time is spent navigating from A to B, and the Martian scenery doesn't have the sort of life or vibrancy that allows GTA to make the journey something that can entertain in its own right.
- Review: Alan Wake: The Writer
Now that the "season" is over, what do you think of the concept of episodic gaming as seen in Alan Wake? I love the notion of playing a game the same way you view television, one sensible hour at a time delivered over the course of weeks. Had developer Remedy delivered extra episodes as powerful as the original content it could have proven the power of that method. Sadly they did not. If this were a TV show I suspect it would face cancellation.
- Review: Alan Wake | Edge Magazine
The resulting experience is in many ways as generic as the fiction from which it takes its cues. Five years in development, it’s an action-focused spin on survival horror that fails to advance the formula beyond the five-year-old benchmark set by Resident Evil 4. At times it’s hard not to notice the incremental changes effected during the game’s protracted development period like the rings on a felled tree trunk. Sprawling forest environments and incongruous, empty driving sequences hint at the original open-world concept, and the frantic gathering and even more frantic replacement of batteries during the more intense encounters recalls the contrived tension of early survival horror games.
- Destructoid :: Alan Wake
- Alan Wake Xbox 360 Review - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
- The Best Video Game Endings from 1UP.com
- Fallout: New Vegas review: War sometimes changes, a little | Joystiq
Obsidian hasn't even fixed the kludginess inherent to Fallout 3. The camera still gets stuck in the wrong location for dialog sequences and A.I. pathing is still comically unnatural. If I were looking at Fallout: New Vegas as a product, I'd say it's shocking that it's being released to the public in this state.
But as an experience ... well, tech problems are enough to take you out of it occasionally, but not to write the whole thing off. Heck, I bet technical failures are all but an oddly endearing series hallmark for some of you; I know I'd be lying if I said I didn't get an odd kick out of the lousy pathing. Sorry, other glitches: You're still obnoxious.
- Review: Donkey Kong Country Returns- Destructoid
Earlier this year, Nintendo released Super Mario Galaxy 2, a game I think may very well be the best 3D Mario game ever made. Just last month, Kirby’s Epic Yarn came out, one of the most polished, beautiful, and creative entries in the adorable franchise.
And now we have Donkey Kong Country Returns, a game I can easily say is the best Donkey Kong game ever released.
That’s three major Nintendo platforming franchises right there, all releasing three of the best games in their respective series all in one year.