Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I saw Magicka: Wizard Wars while I was at GDC, and it was the highlight of my week. Magicka was a fascinating oddity out of left-field, and enormously entertaining, but on seeing Wizard Wars I immediately sensed that the idea could find its mature, developed form in multiplayer. Anyway, it’s taken a little while for assets to surface, and now they have I wanted to share them – and my enormous excitement about this game – with you.

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We all have our embarrassing secrets. For instance, Jim has never hopped, too scared to take such a risk with gravity. Adam never realised you were supposed to apologise to ducks. And I’ve never played System Shock 2. It’s not my fault – I was busy. But with my first gap in my schedule since August 1999, I’ve been having a go at the freshly re-released version on Steam. It’s… it’s not easy, is it?

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For the first time in ages, Deus Ex director Warren Spector is unemployed. The man who created what’s regarded by many as the greatest game of all time isn’t cracking any whips, cooking up cyber conspiracies, or teaching cartoon mice to sing. Instead, he’s taking some time to both teach and learn, which is what brought him to UC Santa Cruz’s recent Interactive Storytelling Symposium. There, he echoed the refrain that’s recently become his calling card: take games to new, interesting places, and don’t just lean on crutches from film, TV, and the like to do it. It was a call to action – a plea for tomorrow’s burgeoning brains to break outside the box and then burn the remains. Do not, however, mistake that for an admission of inaction on Spector’s part. Unemployed or not, his gears are churning again, and he’s starting to think about his next big move. After his session, Spector and I discussed why he can’t simply make another Deus-Ex-esque game, why he really wants to put a “no weapons restriction” on his next project, Kickstarter’s popularity among his pioneering peers, Epic Mickey in retrospect, and more.

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2. Hello youse.
3. It strikes me that we haven’t done a LIST PIECE in a while, and that’s a little bit crazy. After all, everyone loves lists. Many of the most popular written pieces on the internet are purely lists. And nothing encourages debate more than a good list.
4. “Hey, did you see that list?” “I can’t believe what was number one on that list!” “That list is ridiculous! I am so outraged by the order of listed items on that list!”
5. That kind of thing.
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There’s a weird tension to Gone Home. On the one hand it should be the most normal thing in the world: an American household. On the other, well, it’s unusual for games to try and tell stories about everyday lives. But that’s precisely what it does, and that’s just part of what makes it so beautifully weird.

I met Fullbright’s project lead, Steve Gaynor, and talked about that. This is how we got on.
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It’s time to look at what $20 will actually get you in the landscape of “free” to play gaming. What does it actually mean? And what is that crisp, all-too-real twenty actually worth in various imaginary economies? In the first of an ongoing series we sent Cara off to do some shopping in DOTA 2. Just what could she get for twenty bucks?

Daddy RPS said he’d give me this $20 note to shop with, but what happened was RPS was out of change that day and so RPS patted me on the head and said “Okay off you go, go and buy yourself something nice in a Free To Play and we will reimburse you.” Challenge Accepted. I gathered the Fashion Police, which largely resembled a troupe of models from Zoolander (Tom, Alice, Dan, Philippa and I all have razor sharp cheekbones) and we went shopping with Daddy’s money. Which I hope Daddy actually has or this may be some sort of elaborate prank…

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Back in Feb we had a little chin wag about the mad dash of annual graphics hardware launches slowing to a saunter. We can add a little more flesh to the bones of that story this week, with some pretty plausible looking details of Nvidia’s upcoming plans – and further confirmation of nothing new from AMD. It’s worth a quick dip into the mucky waters of rumour for anyone pondering a GPU upgrade or a generally a new rig as some new kit – of sorts – is imminent. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s mid-May and it’s raining outside. Someone I can’t see is making me laugh. These omens suggest that it is time to return to my Idle Musing column. Something else inspired this, too, which was last week’s Planetside 2 Call To Arms. I had intended to film the whole thing and then chop it up for YouTube commentary, but once I was on the Mumble voice server, I found myself running a platoon. Then I found myself marvelling at the effort the RPS guys had put in to the organisation of allowing players to communicate. There were dedicated radio operators in each squad. And then I was thinking about voice comms. And not doing any filming at all.

I suddenly realised how voice communications had invisibly underpinned a decade of the most incredible gaming experiences. This is a missive to their importance, the joy they brought.
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Princess + bomb = cake. Wasteland baseball brutality. Endangered hypertext preserve.

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Minimalism
Ludum Dare 26 theme
Haikus: fitting, no? Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Petrie (R.E.) is minutes away from losing control of 2C again. The Ascension Day questions started harmlessly enough (“How fast did he go up, Sir?”, “Did he wave to the Apossums?”) . It was only when Angela Jessop opened her mouth that the lesson began to disintegrate. Angela is of the opinion that Daedalus and Icarus were frauds, and Jesus was, technically, the first aviator. Her assertion that the Son of God probably owned an invisible helicopter, is, like all of Angela’s assertions, difficult to dispute. Mr Petrie mumbles something about omnipotence then closes his eyes, surrendering to the growing hubbub. Mentally he’s already at home, a glass of chilled Budvar in his hand, an evening of undisturbed Formula Truck and DCS UH-1H Huey stretching blissfully ahead of him. Read the rest of this entry »