Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The internet is probably full of information about this. Don’t you think?

This is the best single general history of videogames that I’ve ever read and I can’t think of a reason that you shouldn’t go and order a copy of it immediately. Unless you already own one. Or you’re Tristan Donovan himself. The reason why it’s the best are laid out in the second paragraph of the book, where he answers the question why write another book about this stuff anyway…
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Honestly, I could handle being the plaything of some unseen, sadist creator. I mean, that’s what we do every day. Now, however, I hate everybody. Everybody Edits is a browser-based platformer where the levels you play in are created by anyone who wants to create a level. That could be you, but it’s probably not. Once it’s finished, you (or more likely, they) open it up to everyone, and you get up to about 50 people all piling on in a single server, to try and beat it. Or, in some cases, you are just along for the ride.
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Piped transmissions from Alec link me to this story on GI.biz, in which ActiBlizz ultraboss Bobby Kotick, talking to the FT, says he wants to support the PC, primarily because it is an open platform. This comes as part of getting grumpy with Xbox Live taking money for people basically just playing Call Of Duty. “Mr Kotick sees an opportunity to break the consoles’ “walled gardens with new gamer-friendly PCs, designed to be plugged into the television,” says the FT report. “Activision will “very aggressively” support efforts by Dell and HP to connect PCs to TVs.”

Of course, ActiBlizz is mostly supported by World Of Warcraft anyway, which has got to create a nagging sensation for anyone who is firmly locked into console land.

There’s more movement from Interplay regarding Fallout: Online, their MMO of the post-apocalyptic series that’s been the subject of so much legal dispute. There’s a press release on Interplay’s site that explains the first newsletter about the game is being sent out to those who signed up to the teaser site that appeared last month.

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Last week I let you know Wot I Think of Telltale’s latest, Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent. This week you can decide for yourself, by having a play of the demo. It’s a cross between the DS’s Professor Layton series, and the DS’s Professor Layton series. With gnomes.

Jordan Thomas first came to our attention with Thief: Deadly Shadows where he co-designed the Cradle with Randy Smith. Next he was on Bioshock, with his fingerprints over all Fort Frolic. Then, he stepped up to Creative Director at 2k Marin with Bioshock 2. He’s highly verbal, scarily optimistic and wants to talk to you about the Immersive Sim as an Anti-genre, the death of seriousness and the growth of snark, Thomas Moore Utopian fiction and what Ion Storm Austin were considering doing with Deus Ex 3…
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Amnesia, the new game from Frictional Games – they who brought us the Penumbra series – is due to be with us on the 8th September. I’ve had a play with the first third (of what must be a pretty big game), and have written up my thoughts for Eurogamer. It begins:

“I think a mark of quality in a game is whether you can return to a room you’ve previously been in, and know you were there earlier by the destruction you wrought. Amnesia, the new first-person adventure from Penumbra developers Frictional, does not paint rooms in the blood of your enemies, but rather in strewn desk drawers, boxes and broken glass.

And light.

Amnesia is looking to be an extremely dark game, but rather than offering you the opportunity to sneak silently in the welcoming shadows, here darkness is your enemy. It is the path to insanity.”

Read on.

Things are afoot in TeamFortress2Land, things of tease and mystery. Firstly there’s a new item: the golden wrench – a Midas weapon for the turning of people into gold – which internet boffins think might just be a clue as to the nature of the next update. But then there’s this TF2 comic, which tells a little tale of an engineer’s life, and unravels more of what seems to be an extra-complex history-explicating backstory for our favoured cartoonish shooter. All this seems ponderful enough… but wait! There are hidden links within the comic. On page four this, and then, within the source code of that page, a link to the obscured signature, here, and a portrait of the family, here. IT IS SOME KIND OF CLUE-BASED PUZZLE EVENT!

Frictional Games’ new horror title, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is probably going to give me nightmares. They seem to be celebrating this with a new trailer, which sets the release date for Sepetember 8th, and reminds us why we should be interested in the gloomy spookiness of their game design. Feel vaguely disconcerted, below. (Also, the main site reveals that they are definitely planning a demo, which sounds like a good idea to me.)
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Sundays are for waking up in a friend’s house, trying to decide whether you should feed the cat, and just before rushing off to clear out house find time to compile a shorter-than-usual selection of fine (mostly) games related reading I’ve come across this week, while trying to resist to link to awesome festival sci-fi shenanigans.

• I was smirking at McSweeny’s Building Code Violations of Love Shack when I hit the totally Sunday Papers relevant Roland Barthes Reviews Pac-Man. Good work, Paul Krumholz.

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