Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Somewhere in a warehouse there’s a monster. It is being hunted by men with laser-sighted shotguns and pistols. They have movement sensors and flashlights, and the monster is doing all it can to keep away from them. Plot twist: It’s me! I have a knife and some bombs. I can see through the boxes, I can cling to walls and ceilings, and I’m invisible. In fact, it’s the team below me that are terrified. They’re shooting at things that aren’t there, pumping rounds into shadows, and one of them just died from friendly fire. At this rate, I could wait out the panic and let them kill off one other.
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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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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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Minimalism
Ludum Dare 26 theme
Haikus: fitting, no? Read the rest of this entry »

I have apparently taken leave of my entire personality, and am engrossed in an MMO. Worse, I’m *playing with others*. This is about how I came to such a place.

Something’s wrong with me. I’m… I’m doing things – things I shouldn’t want to do. I’m – and please be understanding – I’m playing nicely with others. For crying out loud, I’m running a guild.

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It’s foolish to try to predict a hit.

I cannot imagine a world in which Rogue Legacy is not a hit.

There’s no question that Rogue Legacy owes a massive amount to Spelunky. But crucially, it’s an evolution of the type of game, not a mimic, a festival of completely original ideas on top of a familiar roguelike platformer mechanic. In each new game a castle (and later tower, forest and dungeon) is procedurally generated in gorgeous 2D pixel art, into which your brave hero must venture, gathering gold, blueprints and bonus items, seeing how far he or she can reach before inevitable death. But rather than starting again from scratch, here every death is met with progress.

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UFO Online is a free to play, browser-based turn-based strategy game from Gamigo, and it’s heavily based on both X-COM and XCOM. It’s in open beta now. I tried to play it.

It’s enemies’s turn! I do love me a shonkily-translated game, and whatever happened while gamingo’s browser-based X-COMlike UFO Online was being transformed from German to English, the net result is that it reads like it was written by Gollum.

Grammar-snark aside, does this turn-based strategy offering manage to capture the glory of the all-father of PC gaming? Well, I made it less than an hour in before it bluescreened my computer, but that was more than enough to make me feel like I’d taken a bath in a tub full of used nappies.
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Thanks to an unexpected extension by hosts IndieGoGo, the marvelous-looking Ghost Of A Tale gets another week to hit the all-or-nothing fundraising target. It’s one of those strange little projects that can come only from a talented individual with a very personal vision, and I have to declare that I really would like to see it get made. I talked to Lionel Gallat, who has quit the mainstream film industry to submerge himself in solo game dev, about this beautifully animated experiment.
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