Comments on: Gaming In The Russian Cosmos, Part 2

By: Slade05

Slade05 — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:29:49 +0000

Gah, don`t get too excited about russian development scene.
Sure, they have their share of originality and whatnot, but there is also a literal shitload of low-budget crap that floods the market and really good releases. Don`t forget about economical crisis, which already took it`s toll: several game magazines are put on hold, afforementioned 1c has to close some of it`s projects and cut funding overall. Sure, we`ll get some pretty high-quality releases this year, but they`ll come from estabilished teams that already adhere much to western development strategies. Someone mentioned Silent Storm…the problem is, this game had nothing, erm, russian(how do i make letters italic?) in it and it was only good because of PC turn-based market practically empty at the moment and rather gimmicky environment destruction.
Then there is a lack of proper QA: how many of you played 7.62 or E5(those are strategy titles rooting from Jagged Alliance type of games)? Both games feel damn refreshing due to innovative and really cool gameplay mechanic somehat similar to Combat Mission approach but even better, and both were simply flooded with bugs on the time of russian release. Thanks to developers, they were able to remove most of those bugs, rather quickly too. Then came affordable western realese based on latest patch and without scary Starforce protection inside(another really awful issue in russian development, but I won`t go into that now). Point is, how russian playerbase should feel about game being pratically tested on it`s expence? Business is business, yes, but what the f*ck.

By: Ivan

Ivan — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 03:54:09 +0000

One of the best articles i’ve ever read. I’m from Serbia (we’re in a situation very similar to Russia’s, but we’re much, much smaller) and i completely understand what you are trying to say.

Rock Paper SHotgun should be home of all PC gamers…

Thank You.

By: Kan3da

Kan3da — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:26:55 +0000

They indeed do great games. Most of them are broken and lack the polish but are feeling more like the sequels of the games i enjoyed most in the “golden era” of pc gaming. Sigh, there i install silent storm again…

By: PHeMoX

PHeMoX — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:40:35 +0000

I’ve still got a handful of those 7Wolf 1$ copies of ancient games… the illegal market used to be insane over there.

I wonder if it’s still the same these days, but I fear it’s even worse.

By: yhancik

yhancik — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:40:04 +0000

Some gameplay videos of Tension/Turgor/The Void, for those interested.

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=Throdax&view=videos

Contains potential spoilage, of course.

(btw, nice contextual ad on this article :p
)

By: N

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:00:11 +0000

Romania apparently has a very strong pool of codemonkeys for example, ubi set up shop there in ‘95 and the last two silent hunter games, pc version of jack’s king kong, and the upcoming hawx(meh) ar made in ro. EA mobile has a tent there too, also Funlabs (Cabela’s series). Unfortunately the indie scene is dead as disco, so yeah…

I remember Realms of Torment, it was supposed to be a pretty innovative fantasy mmo, never saw the light of day, probably for the best too…

By: ZagZagovich

ZagZagovich — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:10:47 +0000

About Lada Racing Club thing that I mentioned earlier. It’s been hyped for a long time to be Need for Speed in Russia. There has been a huge marketing campaign, so huge that it was hard not to see something about the game and though the game has been delayed a couple of times it only made everyone want it more. So the release date finally comes and what do we get? A game that’s pretty much half-made, with amazing glitches, horrifying effects and a garbage file put on a disk just to sell it on two DVDs. It was like some kind of event. Something we haven’t seen since “Fight with a shadow”(horrible movie based game that sold like crazy) developers revealed that they just slapped the game in a few weeks and then laughed as the money started to pour in. Every gaming magazine was covering it differently. One of my favorites just wrote a whole two page article about how disgusted he is with the game and it’s creators. The other one(a rather popular one) had the nerve to actually give the game a fair 7.5 rating. Later they said that the garbage file was something the are going to use for the upcoming addon(addon that never came out btw). It was such a horrible scam. I’m still a bit sad about how easy they got away with it.

By: Dreamhacker

Dreamhacker — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:30:57 +0000

From the album link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/grill/2451744648/in/set-72157606089141975/

This photo had a frigging hilarious caption in the Swedish PCG, something along the lines of “Jim Rossignol shortly after being rejected by the cute receptionist at PCG Russia.”

Ouch :D

By: CryingTheAnnualKingo

CryingTheAnnualKingo — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:23:16 +0000

Jim, I can’t commend you enough for this these pieces. This is the type of writing that needs to be happening in PC games right now that just isn’t being done by mainstream media.
As Crytek goes multi-platform, the East is the future of PC games in the truest sense, the sense that we all want; PC specific games made to take advantage of what we love about our machines.

By: bhlaab

bhlaab — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:42:31 +0000

“Russian developers all want to make a new Fallout!”

Then do it, for the love of god!

By: jonfitt

jonfitt — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:52:36 +0000

So where’s the next hotbed of PC game development after Russia?

I say: keep your eyes on The Kingdom of Tonga. Having seen an influx of money from the .to top level domain, they have been producing increasingly complex games based on a utopian future of plantation running, and rugby.

By: Cooper42

Cooper42 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:11:00 +0000

Here’s hoping that the idiosyncratic, experimental and innovative designs coming out of Russia and the post-Soviet states don’t go the way of early 90s British game design…